DR MWAKYEMBE: IGP MWEMA, DCI MANUMBA NOT DOING JUSTICE TO ME, AND THEY KNOW IT

I have been compelled today, Saturday 18th February 2012 to issue this statement to the media following a meeting with the DCI Robert Manumba with news reporters yesterday (17/02/12) to discuss, along other issues, my health condition and concluding in a sloppy fashion that “I was not made to drink poison” but that I am just suffering from a skin disease without elaborating what sort of skin disease it is and what caused it!

I wish to make it very clear that this position of the Police Force has disturbed me a great deal in this situation of disease that I face, first by interfering with the process of my treatment and deep investigation on its origin; secondly by its narrow scope of understanding that comes out vividly in the Police Force statement which emphasizes that “I was not made to drink poison” whereas poison doesn’t have to be taken by drinking so that it harms someone, as one can just be brought into contact with such poison; and thirdly the Police Force to interfere in the matter which for about one year now it has never had a firm intention to understand it or investigate it outside making fun of it through the newspapers.

It will be recalled that on February 9, 2011 I wrote a letter to IGP Said Mwema to notify him about plots on my life and of other leaders. Recognising that the Tanzania Police Force always insists of being given evidence first before to start working on the matter, I made sure that I have provided in the letter all evidence I could find or be given.

(This procedure of the Police Force of waiting to be given evidence on the table, in the manner magistrates wait for evidence in court, doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world (except Tanzania only) because the core function of the Police is not to be given, it is to seek evidence. What the Police need all over the world is to get a clue or just a rumour. That is enough to unearth all the evidence needed).

Along with making an effort to bring up all sorts of evidence that I had, four things showed me clearly that the Police did not have a firm resolve to investigate the matter.

(i) A few days after giving the IGP the letter, they sent a team of ‘investigators’ to my office to take additional explanations. The team was led by ACP Mkumbo, a police officer whom a few weeks earlier was among police officers who were suspected of receiving bribes in order to slap false charges on a son of IPP Executive Chairman Reginald Mengi, of involvement in narcotics traffic, a question which up to now the Police Force leadership has not been able to clarify to any acceptable magnitude. On that basis, I had been sent a bribe or crime suspect to steer investigation on other suspects of crime! I understood right from that moment that the whole exercise was a farce, a salutary farce!

(ii) A few weeks after my letter was presented to the IGP and the ACP Mkumbo team ‘started work,’ the Police Force took the step of congratulating and awarding police officers I had cited as suspected of cooperating with criminals! You don’t need to be a professor of philosophy to know that this was a clear signal of ignoring me.

(iii) Lately suspicions of police officers being involved in criminal activities in Morogoro region when they reached a high decibel level touched the same police officers I had suspected in my letter, and the IGP took the step of transferring them to other regions!

(iv) So as to make me totally despair, my ‘top secret’ letter to the IGP was deliberately leaked to the media and published as news which jeered at and refuted the whole statement I had given, I don’t know to whose benefit! But this is a routine game of the police as recently Hon. Minister Samuel Sitta, when being questioned by a senior police officer in his office, when the two of them were alone, a statement on the meeting was in the papers snorting over the evidence that was given by Sitta! The integrity of the police force leadership is on the line.

I have explained in detail in my letter to the IGP that the murderous group had been directed to assassinate me by using poison, a statement which for the whole year the Police have not been interested in following up, for reasons best known to themselves.

Now what is this new pressure of the Police Force want to know if I was poisoned or not and jumping to issue a statement even before investigating how I am, to question me and my assistants in office and even to converse with Indian experts who conducted a medical investigation on me, where does it come from?

I am similarly ill at ease to believe that DCI Manumba and his colleagues read the proper medical report on my condition or some ‘other’ report, and if they read that report themselves or it was ‘read to them’ ! I am saying so because what was said by DCI Manumba to reporters is totally at variance with the picture in the medical report from Apollo which says clearly that there is something in the bone marrow which has brought up the condition that I have, something that experts are searching to find a way to control or remove it and meanwhile our state organs are pushed on by big bribe pushers to say without any scientific basis and without shame: ‘he wasn’t poisoned,’ ‘he wasn’t poisoned’!

I have said in the same class in the Faculty of Law at the Hill with DC Manumba. Afterwards IGP Mwema was my law student at the Hill. These two bigwigs of public security have not acted rightfully in my regard, and they know it. They also know I will not remain silent or mumble my words come what may when right is being trampled underfoot.

Let us pray for each other’s health and life so that we act rightfully on one another and act rightfully on our country by finishing off hanging and troublesome matters of Dowans, EPA, Kagoda , etc for the wider interests of our Nation.

God Bless Tanzania.

SOURCE: GUARDIAN ON SUNDAY