By Margaret Kamba 

"The Zimbabwe Republic Police is seized with addressing the drug and substance abuse menace to help avoid a generation gap," says ZRP Acting Officer Commanding Drugs and Narcotics Criminal Investigation Department, Michael Chibaya

Speaking on the sidelines of celebrations to mark National Youth Day in Masvingo, Chibaya said numerous efforts were being made to arrest the issue.

"Iam here standing in for the Supply Reduction Pillar. Prior to this, Zimbabwe used to be a transit route for drugs. However, we have also turned into a consumer country. In this case, the government has come up with support through the birth of the National Elimination Committee on Drugs and Substance Abuse, which wants to involve everyone from grassroots level to the top to fight this scourge," Chibaya said.

"As the Supply Reduction Pillar, our duty is to curtail the supply side of the drugs. What we are doing as activities is to raid all those bases where drug dealers are operating from. We have intensified patrols on our border with the use of surveillance cameras as well as drones. We also have our members conducting cargo profiling and passenger and vehicular profiling to make sure that anything which is bringing drugs and substances in thus country is monitored."

The Acting Commanding Officer also took time to share statistics of arrests made as well as campaigns carried out.

"For the year January 1 to December 31, 2023, we managed to arrest 9291 accused persons of which 7762 were male and 1529 were female. Out of those 9291, 1439 were sent to court the issue being that 1071 were suppliers. In this case we are more concerned with suppliers. Of those sent to court, 874 were convicted," he said.

"We want the end users to be rehabilitated back into the community. That is why we came up with this National Elimination Committee on Drugs and Substance Abuse. We want to avoid a generation gap in our country in the future. 

"We also destroyed a total of 119 bases throughout and carried out 321 campaigns. The Police is not just there to arrest. We also want to educate our people about the dangers of drugs and substance abuse."

This year’s National Youth Day commemorations are being held under the theme "Positioning youth empowerment and development towards vision 2030."