Child abduction cannot go unnoticed, unabated!

The Monitor Editor | Tuesday June 21, 2022 06:00

This affects both children and adults, but of late there have been more cases of child abductions being reported. While challenges like this are not peculiar to Botswana, we as a nation seem not to be doing enough.

By now, we could have ample information on whether the abductions are done by human traffickers or other factors such as being taken for ritual murders.

The nation currently has resorted to speculation as most feel our law enforcement agencies are not giving ‘missing person’ cases the attention they deserve.

In March of this year, a six-year-old boy Tlotso Karema was reported missing by his parents in Lobatse, and after less than a month of his disappearance, the bones of the young boy were discovered along the Kanye road.

According to the police, DNA testing revealed that the bones belong to Tlotso, but his family and the Lobatse community does not believe that the bones are of the young boy.

Still on this issue, there is yet another article on a missing person report in Tlokweng. This time, a 16-year-old girl, who at the time of going missing, was a student at Matlala Junior Secondary School. This is just the tip of an iceberg as ‘missing person’ reports are filed quite frequently in different police stations across the country.

Is our law enforcement doing enough? People who go missing and never return home or those whose remains end up being discovered later on are usually added to the list of cold cases.

Perhaps that is why the perpetrators seem to be causing havoc without any regard for the law or respect for human life. It took the Lobatse community rioting for the police to treat Tlotso’s disappearance with the urgency it deserves.

Deputy Commissioner of the Botswana Police Service, Solomon Mantswe accompanied by the Directorate of Intelligence and Security director-general, Peter Magosi held a press conference in Lobatse on Friday where they promised residents that they will leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of the young boy’s disappearance.

Now that it has become clear that cases of abduction have increased in the country, it is of the utmost importance that stakeholders rally together to come up with ways to gather accurate information on these cases and come up with a way of curbing the number of abductions.

Those who perform these heinous acts should be brought to book and the penalty should be hefty. It is every Motswana’s right to be protected and enjoy life without fear! Let’s stand together and protect our children; let’s help the police with information that can lead to the arrest of the abductors.