Things Fall Apart - Literally
There is a small metal sign that welcomes all and sundry to Nembudziya Police Station, and a glance at the charge office from a distance indeed makes one feel welcome.
But inside, trouble is brewing in the cauldron of ZRP Nembudziya in the Gokwe district of Midlands province.
It is not the weather-beaten, partially burnt wooden modules that used to be sweet home for police officers deployed to the place when it was still a post for Gokwe police station. They are still standing and habitable – weather-beaten, but fine.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for the brickwork erected when Nembudziya was upgraded to station status.
On the face of it, Nembudziya is a very modern rural police station, with residential houses built along the lines of the famous Battlefields police camp – three bedrooms, a lounge, a pantry, bathroom and toilet.
Going into the cells, you would wish to be arrested to spend just one night behind the immaculate bars and pump a few muscles in the cell birds’ exercise room. There is only one word to describe the detention cells at Nembudziya – world-class.
On the office building floors, I actually saw the eccentric overgrowth on my chin, evidence that I had spend days away from home and needed a soapy bath and a shave. Outside, there is a courtyard and a small magistrate’s court room that could have been a panacea for Nembudziya court woes, but for the shortage of judges in the area that rendered the court a white elephant.
Model police station indeed.
But that is before you take your eyes off the floor and glance up the corridor walls; to be greeted by yawning cracks that look like black mambas in the corridor dimmed by the absence of electricity. In that semi-darkness, you can easily spot the cracks because they are the ones through which light filters.
There is another one that ate through the kitchen wall, with several more crevices in the adjacent rooms.
Outside, the scene is utter chaos. It is as if a moderate earthquake swept through the whole station, wreaking that sinking type of havoc that left tens of police officers homeless. But, no; the buildings just started disintegrating on their own without any provocation whatsoever.
Amazing, you might think. Perplexing. Mind boggling.
The Officer-In-Charge is just as flummoxed. “When I first left this place in 1998, Nembudziya was the best station I had ever been to,” says Chief Insp Kota Mhike.
But, while at Gweru Traffic where he had been transferred to from Nembudziya, the man now at the helm of an implosion kept hearing that the police precinct that had nurtured his law maintenance skills was literally going to the ground; but – having been here when Nembudziya was just a small post with a few module structures; and having seen the station proper rising from the same ground, he simply could not believe it.
No; not his Nembudziya. We could not believe it either when, while we were still at the district headquarters in Gokwe the man who oversses the administration of police work in Nembudziya, Supt Wilbert Mandigora, warned us about the disaster that awaited us ahead.
We thought we had heard it all before – someone alerting us during the journey that we had to be very careful in Gokwe, because the area had mosquitoes that were as big as that small bird called chidhiidhii. Or that the farming town’s inhabitants were so belligerent that dropping an axe on someone was as easy as canning a mischievous boy. It all turned out to be false.
So; how bad could Nembudziya be, we asked ourselves, thinking that the chief administrator was being hyperbolic when he said we could actually shake hands with someone inside one of the houses through the gaping crack.
But upon arrival, we all gasped, as must have the OIC when he returned to lead the station early this year – Supt Mandigora was really being economic with the truth when he said the situation was bad.
He said that of course, adding that we were going to see for ourselves. What he did not say was that the canteen’s roof had to be taken down after the brick work started bisecting into two, one part sinking into the ground. Neither did he tell us that the drainage system had choked a long time ago such that ablution facilities had to be removed from the mess, and people had to revert the old Blair that we know.
With his hands on his back, the OIC shook his head as he looked at the crumpling shell he once called home sweet home.
“This is unbelievable.” He seemed to be talking to himself.
All in all, there are about thirteen abandoned buildings, including the mess and the canteen; eight of the buildings no longer have roofs. More could be on the way; our news crew could see more dismantling houses with people still in them. Even the fireplace was not spared; it is splintering right down its middle.
And standing amidst this remarkable desolation are the wooden modules; unaffected, but amazed by the chaos surrounding them. So too are the two old detention blocks. They have been here for many years; it is only natural that they had to die first.
So how come it is these new buildings that have not even seen twenty yet that are crumpling like a deck of cards? Could this be a good example of shoddy workmanship – because on all splits on the houses, there is no visible evidence that any form of reinforcement was added to the brickwork.
Many of the affected members at the station believe so; where have you ever seen a house being built without brick force (reinforcement wires, actually), they ask, waving away another theory that suggests that Nembudziya was sited on a mass grave left during the war, and that the dead – livid to be squatted upon – were fighting back.
The soil texture on which the station was built on is also said to be too soft you could have dug the foundation with bare hands. Which could explain why the canteen is sinking – it is simply too heavy for its underlying surface.
You could think that that canteen was sinking with the feelings of the station staff too. But you would be wrong – work is going on very well in Nembudziya. All they are concerned about are how to tackle the rapes, thefts and other crimes that characterise their district – so much that they were celebrating the arrest of a gang of muggers who were terrorising residents in the area. They seem oblivious to the distress surrounding them.
Besides, there was news filtering through that a new site for the station had been availed for the station; a better site as it were. Still, they were not moved – there is work to do in the Nembudziya, and there is simply no time to waste brooding about where the next roof is going to come from.
But inside, trouble is brewing in the cauldron of ZRP Nembudziya in the Gokwe district of Midlands province.
It is not the weather-beaten, partially burnt wooden modules that used to be sweet home for police officers deployed to the place when it was still a post for Gokwe police station. They are still standing and habitable – weather-beaten, but fine.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for the brickwork erected when Nembudziya was upgraded to station status.
On the face of it, Nembudziya is a very modern rural police station, with residential houses built along the lines of the famous Battlefields police camp – three bedrooms, a lounge, a pantry, bathroom and toilet.
Going into the cells, you would wish to be arrested to spend just one night behind the immaculate bars and pump a few muscles in the cell birds’ exercise room. There is only one word to describe the detention cells at Nembudziya – world-class.
On the office building floors, I actually saw the eccentric overgrowth on my chin, evidence that I had spend days away from home and needed a soapy bath and a shave. Outside, there is a courtyard and a small magistrate’s court room that could have been a panacea for Nembudziya court woes, but for the shortage of judges in the area that rendered the court a white elephant.
Model police station indeed.
But that is before you take your eyes off the floor and glance up the corridor walls; to be greeted by yawning cracks that look like black mambas in the corridor dimmed by the absence of electricity. In that semi-darkness, you can easily spot the cracks because they are the ones through which light filters.
There is another one that ate through the kitchen wall, with several more crevices in the adjacent rooms.
Outside, the scene is utter chaos. It is as if a moderate earthquake swept through the whole station, wreaking that sinking type of havoc that left tens of police officers homeless. But, no; the buildings just started disintegrating on their own without any provocation whatsoever.
Amazing, you might think. Perplexing. Mind boggling.
The Officer-In-Charge is just as flummoxed. “When I first left this place in 1998, Nembudziya was the best station I had ever been to,” says Chief Insp Kota Mhike.
But, while at Gweru Traffic where he had been transferred to from Nembudziya, the man now at the helm of an implosion kept hearing that the police precinct that had nurtured his law maintenance skills was literally going to the ground; but – having been here when Nembudziya was just a small post with a few module structures; and having seen the station proper rising from the same ground, he simply could not believe it.
No; not his Nembudziya. We could not believe it either when, while we were still at the district headquarters in Gokwe the man who oversses the administration of police work in Nembudziya, Supt Wilbert Mandigora, warned us about the disaster that awaited us ahead.
We thought we had heard it all before – someone alerting us during the journey that we had to be very careful in Gokwe, because the area had mosquitoes that were as big as that small bird called chidhiidhii. Or that the farming town’s inhabitants were so belligerent that dropping an axe on someone was as easy as canning a mischievous boy. It all turned out to be false.
So; how bad could Nembudziya be, we asked ourselves, thinking that the chief administrator was being hyperbolic when he said we could actually shake hands with someone inside one of the houses through the gaping crack.
But upon arrival, we all gasped, as must have the OIC when he returned to lead the station early this year – Supt Mandigora was really being economic with the truth when he said the situation was bad.
He said that of course, adding that we were going to see for ourselves. What he did not say was that the canteen’s roof had to be taken down after the brick work started bisecting into two, one part sinking into the ground. Neither did he tell us that the drainage system had choked a long time ago such that ablution facilities had to be removed from the mess, and people had to revert the old Blair that we know.
With his hands on his back, the OIC shook his head as he looked at the crumpling shell he once called home sweet home.
“This is unbelievable.” He seemed to be talking to himself.
All in all, there are about thirteen abandoned buildings, including the mess and the canteen; eight of the buildings no longer have roofs. More could be on the way; our news crew could see more dismantling houses with people still in them. Even the fireplace was not spared; it is splintering right down its middle.
And standing amidst this remarkable desolation are the wooden modules; unaffected, but amazed by the chaos surrounding them. So too are the two old detention blocks. They have been here for many years; it is only natural that they had to die first.
So how come it is these new buildings that have not even seen twenty yet that are crumpling like a deck of cards? Could this be a good example of shoddy workmanship – because on all splits on the houses, there is no visible evidence that any form of reinforcement was added to the brickwork.
Many of the affected members at the station believe so; where have you ever seen a house being built without brick force (reinforcement wires, actually), they ask, waving away another theory that suggests that Nembudziya was sited on a mass grave left during the war, and that the dead – livid to be squatted upon – were fighting back.
The soil texture on which the station was built on is also said to be too soft you could have dug the foundation with bare hands. Which could explain why the canteen is sinking – it is simply too heavy for its underlying surface.
You could think that that canteen was sinking with the feelings of the station staff too. But you would be wrong – work is going on very well in Nembudziya. All they are concerned about are how to tackle the rapes, thefts and other crimes that characterise their district – so much that they were celebrating the arrest of a gang of muggers who were terrorising residents in the area. They seem oblivious to the distress surrounding them.
Besides, there was news filtering through that a new site for the station had been availed for the station; a better site as it were. Still, they were not moved – there is work to do in the Nembudziya, and there is simply no time to waste brooding about where the next roof is going to come from.
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