Courts show no mercy to copper wire thieves

MBABANE - Swaziland’s traffic lights have been darkened too long, lights along even new highways have been blacked out too often and telecommunications disrupted too regularly by outages caused by the theft of copper cable and optic fibre, the country’s courts have decided. The Principal Magistrate's Court and prosecutors acted swiftly last week, handing down unprecedented bail conditions for two copper cable thieves brought to trial just three days after their arrests. Thought to be part of a syndicate that has stripped copper cable from highway light poles and telephone lines, the two men were told they must pay R4.5 million each, a figure half the value of the copper wire found in their possession, prosecutors said. It is a message the authorities hope will spread amongst thieves who have made life dangerous for highway travellers and difficult for phone users. Arrests have been few for this crime partly because penalties have been too low, according to the Royal Swaziland Police Force, which wants fines increased. However, at the urging of the Swaziland Post and Telecommunications Corporation and the Ministry of Public Works and Transportation, magistrates ‘ court judge Sabelo Mngomezulu used his judicial discretion to hand down the multi-million bails. Hundreds of millions of rands worth of copper wire and optic fibre cable have been stolen from public utilities in recent years, prompting the rebuilding of the highway infrastructure in some places to install sturdier, tamperproof light poles.