CHIPEMBERE HIGHWAY TERROR: THE STRUGGLE OF NON-RESIDENTIAL STUDENTS

 

Most of the 4777 Polytechnic students are not accommodated on campus due to insufficient bed space. As a result most have resorted to seeking private accommodation outside campus which for the past decade has rendered them subject to bag-snatchings and assaults. Here is one of my too encounters with these incidents.

By Brian Magombo

Just ten minutes before the midnight of March 11, 2021, I shut down my laptop, closed the notebook I had been leafing through for the past four hours, zipped them in my backpack and took off to the Polytechnic main entrance where I would meet other students who had been studying for their mid semester exams to embark on a 30-minute commute to our Chichiri residence.

As per routine I plugged my ear buds in my phones jack and immersed myself in some K-pop music to kill time while we waited for the whole assemblage to get to the rendezvous and depart.

When all the three arms on my wrist watch ticked to the twelfth hour everyone in the congregation started hastening towards the partially opened gate as if a gun that signals to marathoners to go had went off. While still lost in my little musical Shangri-La, I stepped into the night with the rest of the people, clenching my green windbreaker which was battling the violent howling wind and the weeping sky that made everything about that particular Thursday night seem creepy.

After trekking past the Blantyre High Court I brought my volume down to bring my spatial awareness up and I ended up eavesdropping on one of the boys’ dialogue.

“A girl just got hacked by thugs at the black gate at around 7 PM today, the animals took her bag which had her phone, laptop and some cash in it. THEY INJURED HER RIGHT AT HER HOSTEL’S GATE!!! These people are merciless savages.” He said. 

This did not come as news to me for I have heard this story a million times for the good three years that I have been at the Polytechnic. I had also came across an article where the Polytechnic hostel supervisor, Mr. Isaac Mbewe had once expressed his concern for the students’ safety, “there have always been queries from students seeking places on campus but we could not accommodate each of them because of insufficient bed space” Mbewe said in the article. The robberies have been going on for as long as the late professor Bingu WA Mutharika introduced enrollment based on classroom space instead of bedroom space. This had seen the number of nonresident students skyrocket to the ceiling and with it the number of muggings.

 Just like every other good thing this idea came with a downside which made the nonresidential students fall prey to these predators that lay patiently in the streets waiting to pounce on anyone that walks towards their way. Every week or other week there are stories of a lone student falling victim to these attacks or a girl having her belongings snatched around Chichiri stadium, Chinyonga, Naperi and Chitawira. Some who are unfortunate enough would meet this tragic during broad daylight or as the sun is kissing the horizon. But never for a moment had I ever imagined such misfortune befalling me and the fact I was smart enough to join this pack of students ruled out the possibility of ever finding myself in such a situation.

With all these thoughts racing through my mind it felt like I had teleported from the Blantyre High Court to Chichiri shopping mall for I did not feel the distance. Just as we were approaching the zebra crossing to get to the other side of the road I saw with the aid of the streetlamps a group of men whose number I could not figure out yet due to the distance. They had stopped a car by the roundabout and they seemed to have been exchanging words. As soon as they saw us heading their direction they had deviated their attention from the car which was just taking off and they started heading our way.

The closer we got to these people I came to notice a couple of things; the first was that they were armed with machetes, knifes, Carlsberg Special bottles and one of them had a catapult around his neck, they were eight of them, casually dressed and the one that seemed to be the leader was donning a military camouflage jacket. The second thing I noticed was that they were not drunk despite the possession of the liquor bottles, which meant one thing that those bottles were to be used on us.

 From that moment I knew that we had come face to face with the notorious thugs who haunts the streets of Chichiri, every non-residential student’s nightmare. The quietness of the whole group told me my accomplices knew what was happening too.

A surge of eeriness sped through my spine from my head to my toes leaving me numb and dumbfounded, for a split second I had a myocardial infarction. “I this guess this it, this is the day I get to lose my phone and laptop along with all the information, schoolwork and memories imbued in them. This is the day where the worst case scenario would be someone sheathing their rusty knife in my gut, this is the day where I get to get knocked out with a beer bottle and experience a bar fight pain while coming from studying and wanting to build myself a better future. What about the emotional anguish this would leave on me for the rest of my days. Why did I just not board the bus that was ferrying people to their respective hostels at 200 Kwacha?” I thought to myself in the quickest playback state I have never seen my mind do before.

The sound of a Panga knife being dragged on the tarmac road snapped me back to reality. “Where do you think you are going?” the one wearing a camouflaged jacket asked in his husky voice. He had a malign look in his eyes which told us all that he meant business. There was grave silence, we were all dumbfounded. “ANA A PA POLY NDINU AMWANO- you Polytechnic students are rude” he burst out. It seemed like not getting a response angered him further. 

“Do you know that we can beat you up, take your belongings and your lives too if we wanted to? Just to teach you a lesson not to be walking around this dangerous place this late.” The guy carrying a bottle and happened to be standing the closest to me asked rhetorically. Again he got no reply.

As my adrenal gland flooded my veins with the fight or flight hormone which had my heart banging on my chest cavity loudly I could see under the blinding street lights over our heads that tears had started wailing up in a girl that stood next to me as she shifted closer to where I stood.

Seeing that there was more than twenty of us had them reluctant to engage for we had the numbers on our side, as a result one of them suggested that they just let us go. As if we had all communicated telepathically we started taking off one by one. As we were leaving, the one in a camouflage jacket grabbed the last guy on our group and said something I could not grasp, hoping that the rest of us would get intimidated, and run and leave him behind. When he saw that we were not shaken he let him go. We walked away leaving them in disbelief that they had just let their catch go that easily.

Ten minutes later when I got to the safety of my private hostel I started contemplating to myself why pursuing education had to be this hardened? Why the end of every study session have to turn into a survival? Why have only five people been arrested in crimes related to these muggings and robberies since 2019 when the police know the exact areas these hoodlums operate in? Could this be the reason why the incidents have seen a crescendo? How long will it take till the construction project of the two hostels with 10,000 bed spaces that the vice Principal Dr. Nancy Chitera had told us about in 2019? How many more innocent boys and girls have to suffer under the hands of these criminals before we see light at the end of the tunnel? After all the contemplation and before going to bed I made peace with the fact that it is just another nonresidential students’ day and I cannot cherry pick the moments I face unless the things mentioned here are changed.