You, boy, hold that gun while I call the TV cameras

Around Christmas, there were raids on what were described as brothels, and police said they had rounded up individuals, men and women, who they said were “selling their bodies,” in Zanzibar town, by which I understood they were accused of being prostitutes, or, in today’s parlance, “sex workers.”

There was nothing particularly newsworthy there, since such raids are pretty commonplace, done by people who want to bring God’s strictures to our sinful streets. Nor was there anything startling in the televised interrogations that the police were conducting with the arrested youths.

It is common practice with our police to parade suspects, and even force them to pose in ways suggesting guilt, such as making suspects of armed robbery hold weapons allegedly used in the alleged crime. (I shudder to think what they will one day force those accused of prostitution to do!)

It is an age-old issue with our law enforcement. They are all taught – at least in all so-called Common Law jurisprudences—that an accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, but they leave that at the gates of police colleges after graduation. They are always desperate to get a conviction, and since they cannot be sure they will get it in a court of law, they will try and get in the court of public opinion.

We are, however, not alone in this, if that helps. Around the same time, I was reading the “Letter from Africa” on the BBC, and this particular one was about similar practices by the Nigerian police. Apparently, a band of presumed armed robbers were paraded before media and made to confess to their “crimes.”

But the supposed ringleader of this gang was a well-known graduate of a prestigious girls’ high school in Lagos, so an incredulous journalist who knew her well and had her cellphone number called her, not expecting her to answer the call, because he presumes she would be in police custody.

Surprise, surprise, she picked up the phone, and told the surprised journalist that she was free and okay, driving around town unhindered, and that the whole incident had been a set-up.

By then discerning observers had noted the black eyes and bruised faces of all the alleged armed robbers, which suggested their confessions had been obtained through methods rougher than would be used by the boy scouts.

The same dispatch from Nigeria contained a videoed story of a woman who was arrested on charges of impersonating the wife of a state governor in order to gain access to the presidential residence. The police were shown manhandling her, trying to remove her veil to the media, which she categorically refused to do.

Police brutality and denial of most basic human rights is usually encouraged by their political principals. In the case of Nigeria, we know that the current head of state could never be accused of being a human-rights defender. He has recently sloughed his olive green military garb to slide into flowing “agbadas,” but that will not fool anyone who knew him as the country’s martial dictator in the 1980s.

Now faced with the daunting challenges of the intractable terrorists of Boko Haram, the elusive economic recovery he promised his people and Nigeria’s entrenched corruption, he has thrown his weight behind police brutality.

Recently, he seemed to say that national security should have priority over the rule of law. “The rule of law must be subject to the supremacy of the nation’s security and national interest,” he said, adding, “Where national security and the public interest are threatened, or there is a likelihood of their being threatened, the individual’s rights must take second place in favour of the greater good of society.”

Which is roughly akin to what Tanzania’s President John Magufuli said recently, when he stated that policemen should not be prosecuted for causing deaths in the course of their law enforcement operations.

These statements may sound normal, because they seem to prioritise the common good over a “lone” individual’s rights. The trouble with this view – I’ll discuss it in the future – is that it ignores the fundamental issue of the balance of violence between state agents and an individual, however well armed that individual may be.

Knowing how trigger-happy some of our police agents are, all this lies at the heart of the presumption of innocence till proven guilty in a court of law, and the attempts by our security agents to circumvent that principle.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: