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{
    "id": 783315,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/783315/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 147,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Dr.) Nyikal",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 434,
        "legal_name": "James Nyikal",
        "slug": "james-nyikal"
    },
    "content": "Without the police, we cannot have governance. We cannot even try to fight corruption, if we do not have a police force that is working. Who will investigate all the matters that come? If we have a police force that is not contended, it is a waste of time. Even in our economic development, if we do not have internal security, people cannot invest or go about their daily business activities. Obviously, investors will not come to our country. So, we must start to see the police as a very important agency in our country. We must appreciate their role in the general governance, development and economic prosperity of the country. If we do not see it that way, we will not address the problem. We seem to have realised this because while making the new Constitution, we restructured the police services. We established the National Police Service and gave it the Inspector-General with two deputies to be in charge of the general duty police service and the Administration Police Service. We created the National Police Service Commission because we thought that the day-to-day running of police activities in terms of service, promotion and salaries would be under the service. We have a whole Commission in place, but nothing has changed. We even said there will be an oversight. We created the Independent Police Oversight Authority (IPOA). How have we benefited from all these institutions? The most important aspect of any institution or organisation is the human resource that carries out its functions. If the welfare of police officers is not taken care of, all these other reforms will not take us anywhere. I need not to repeat. The salaries are paltry. The allowances are not even the same. If you look at the police officers that we work with, and the police officers that are working as security to other officers in Government, there is a difference. They are not being treated the same. If you look at the housing conditions of police officers all over the country – I do not want to repeat – people are having gory examples, but those are the realities. They make it look like fiction to us, but that is the reality for police officers. People living in the conditions that have been described here cannot be psychologically stable. So, it is not surprising that every now and then, we hear of police officers turning their arms on themselves or their bosses. I do not think we should try them without testing whether they are mentally stable. It is because of their living and working conditions. How can we trust people with arms yet we know that they are so frustrated? They are not psychologically stable. During the 2015/2016 Financial Year, a lot of money was set aside in the Budget to take care of the issue of housing for police officers. To date, we do not know what happened or why the houses were not built. New police lines were to be established but to date nothing has happened. The current problems are that there may be errors in payment of some police officers, but there are regulations on how deductions should be made. You cannot make deductions until it becomes impossible for people to live. These are things that can be done gradually until the amounts due are fully recovered. We are doing this to a force that has very limited labour relations flexibilities. They cannot go on strike; they cannot join any labour union or demonstrate. This is a frustration we must not visit on police officers. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}