A MAKOKOBA man’s early morning hunt for sex ended in handcuffs when an alert police officer sprinted after him and grabbed him in the middle of Bulawayo’s city centre, moments after he had allegedly dragged a woman into a sanitary lane (mumukoto) and raped her.
Learnmore Dube (28) is accused of attacking the woman (46) on 5 September at around 5am, after she turned down his request for sex.
The woman, who is from Nkulumane 5, was walking along 10th Avenue between JMN Nkomo and J Moyo when Dube approached her and asked to be intimate with her. She said no. What followed, according to police, was a brutal assault in a narrow lane just metres away from a road that would soon be filling up with early morning commuters.
“The accused person grabbed her and dragged her into a sanitary lane and asked her to have sexual intercourse with him. She refused. He went on to pin her down and raped her,” said Bulawayo police spokesperson Assistant Inspector Thandekile Ndlovu, who confirmed the arrest yesterday.
The woman screamed for help. Her cries carried out of the lane and into the street, alerting passers-by who rushed to her rescue.
As people closed in, the sex pest bolted from the scene. He did not get far. A police officer who happened to be in the vicinity gave chase and ran him down, apprehending him before he could disappear into the maze of lanes and side streets that cut through the central business district.
Asst Insp Ndlovu commended the officer for the quick thinking that led to the arrest.
“The police officer responsible for the arrest is commended for the swift response, alertness and dedication demonstrated in apprehending the suspect,” she said.
Dube was arrested and is assisting police with investigations into the matter.
Midnight raid nets uncle accused of raping nieces and sodomising his own brother
In a separate and far darker case, a 28-year-old man who allegedly raped his nieces and sodomised his younger brother over a period of THREE years, ten years ago, was arrested in a coordinated midnight police raid in Chitungwiza on Thursday night.
The suspect, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the victims, was tracked to his father’s house and arrested just after midnight after a failed sting operation, a tip-off that sent him into hiding, and a determined campaign by a Bulawayo businesswoman who refused to let the matter die.
He allegedly raped two cousins, then aged seven and eight, and sodomised his brother, who was about six years old at the time, at their home in Chitungwiza.
For a decade, the abuse stayed buried. It only came to light when the older girl, now aged 18 and based in the United Kingdom, had a meltdown and finally told her mother what her uncle had done to her as a child.
The younger girl said the children had actually spoken up at the time. They told their aunt that their uncle was sexually abusing them. Nothing happened.
“We told our aunt at the time that our uncle was hurting us and she said she would inform our grandmother. She never did. We had lost hope that we would ever get assistance,” she said.
Relatives in the UK were riled by the revelations and tried to get relatives in Zimbabwe to deal with the matter. They got nowhere. Frustrated, they turned to a social media group of Zimbabwean women in the Diaspora seeking assistance, and were referred to a Bulawayo businesswoman, Sipho Mazibuko, who is the curator of Mental Voices Trust and the organiser of the Miss Rural Pageant.
Mazibuko took the issue up and reported the case at Chitungwiza Police Station under RRB Number 6964087.
She then got in touch with the other girl, who is still in Zimbabwe, and the child corroborated her cousin’s story in full.
But the suspect could not be located.
A trap was set for him. It failed after a relative is said to have tipped him off, and he went into hiding.
“He would take the three of us to his bedroom”
The girl who is still in Zimbabwe opened up about what happened inside the house all those years ago.
“He would take the three of us to his bedroom and abuse us. It was horrible. He hurt us badly. “It was very painful. We would scream, but he would not stop,” she said.
She said her uncle would allegedly abuse each child while the others watched, and then sodomise his younger brother.
“I am very grateful to Sipho Mazibuko for taking this issue up. It has been eating me and slowly destroying me over the years,” she said.
When police finally caught up with him, she said, the suspected monster was laughing.
“He was laughing. He kept asking me if I was sure about what we were doing,” she said.
“This man stole my childhood. I hope he rots in jail,” she said.
The sting, the tip-off and the door that would not open
Mazibuko said she arrived in Chitungwiza with Miss Rural Lupane, Christine Mlalazi, ready for war.
Their first move was a sting. They discovered the suspect sold LP Gas and decided to use that against him.
“At first, we got his number and found out that he sells LP Gas. We called him pretending to be bulk buyers and set up a meeting,” she said.
Police waited within the vicinity. The suspect never showed up.
“We suspect that a relative had tipped him off,” said Mazibuko.
After further investigations, Mazibuko was able to establish where the suspect was hiding, and police raided the house around midnight.
She said the suspect’s father was very cooperative.
“He looked deflated and said the police should take him if he had committed the unspeakable acts.”I want to use all my resources to not only protect victims of abuse but to also establish safe shelters for them so that they can be rehabilitated and have a life after court cases are concluded,” said Mazibuko.
Mlalazi said she was inspired to be part of the team that brought the suspect to book, and described the tense final moments outside the house.
“We arrived at the suspect’s home and he refused to open the door.
“Police were about to break it down when he finally opened. He was immediately arrested. This a great statement for the protection of children and women’s rights, as advocated for by the Miss Rural pageant. I’m happy to have been part of it,” she said.
National police spokesperson Commissioner Paul Nyathi could not be reached for comment.
A pattern that keeps repeating
The two arrests land at a time when sexual violence cases continue to fill the country’s courts, with the courts handing down increasingly heavy sentences to those convicted.
Only days ago, a man was jailed for 23 years after raping and robbing an 84-year-old woman, a case that underlined how the elderly and the very young remain the most exposed to predators who strike inside homes, in dark lanes and in the quiet hours before dawn.
The Bulawayo case has also put the spotlight back on the city’s sanitary lanes, the narrow service passages that run behind shops and flats across the central business district. They are poorly lit, rarely patrolled at night, and have long been used as short cuts by early morning workers, vendors and commuters heading for the first kombis of the day. For years residents have complained that the lanes double up as hiding places for muggers and sex pests.
The Chitungwiza case, on the other hand, speaks to a far more uncomfortable reality: that in many households, the danger is not a stranger in a dark lane but a relative sleeping under the same roof. The children in that home spoke out. They named the person hurting them. They were ignored, and a decade passed before anyone acted.
It took a phone call to a social media group, thousands of kilometres away, to finally get the police to the door.