Building smart prisons tops our agenda
PRESIDENT Mnangagwa last year appointed Commissioner General Moses Chihobvu to head the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Service (ZPCS) with orders to modernise the country’s prisons system. After clocking a full year in office, THE SUNDAY MAIL spoke to COMM-GEN
CHIHOBVU(CGC) about his time in office and his plans for ZPCS.
SM: You were appointed Commissioner General of the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Service last year, taking over from the late national hero, Major-General Paradzai Zimondi. Can you outline the work you have undertaken as head of the ZPCS over the last year?
CGC: Since my assumption of office as head of the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional
Service (ZPCS) in November 2020, there has been some notable improvements in a number of areas.
For instance, under institutional accommodation, courtesy of Treasury support, we have completed building a total of 41 semi-detached staff houses at Chikurubi Prison Complex, with construction work on staff houses still ongoing.
More so, plans are underway to construct more staff houses to accommodate our officers across all our administrative provinces.
In terms of farm mechanisation, the ZPCS managed to acquire some farm machinery and implements which include 20 x 80hp tractors, three x 228hp combine harvesters and 10-by-8 row seed drill planters valued at US$1,9 million courtesy of Government’s Belarus Agricultural Farm Equipment Programme.
Indeed, the provision of such equipment will no doubt impact positively on the department’s agricultural production endeavours.
Hence, we look forward to an improved harvest this farming season because our farms have better equipment as compared to the previous years.
Restructuring of the department is another area to note. Through this exercise, three senior officers were elevated to the rank of Deputy Commissioner-General, two of them being female. This is an indication that as a Government department, we are gender sensitive and we remain committed to address gender disparity across all our rank and file, and give our officers equal opportunities.
In the same vein, I am also happy to note that a total of 1 905 non-commissioned officers and 1 169 commissioned officers were also promoted to various ranks.
In terms of staffing, during the period under review, the ZPCS recruited 1 202 members of staff who successfully underwent their basic recruit training, while another recruitment and selection exercise is currently ongoing.
The ZPCS has been experiencing perennial transport challenges, which greatly affected the service’s administrative and operational duties.
However, courtesy of our continuous lobbying for Government support, I am glad to mention that during the period under review, some vehicles were purchased for the ZPCS.
These include 22 single-cab trucks, eight UD lorries and a 30-tonne haulage truck.
Save for the 30-tonne haulage truck and a few lorries which are still undergoing some modifications, most of the vehicles have since been handed over to stations across our administrative provinces.
The provision of these additional vehicles has not only boosted our depleted fleet, but has gone a long way in enhancing our administrative and operational duties.
Through Government’s support, we are hopeful that more vehicles will be procured to cater for our administrative and operational endeavours, as well as catering for officers’ conditions of service.
SM: Can you outline your vision for ZPCS? CGC: To start with, the vision of the ZPCS is “To Become the Leading Correctional Service Provider in The Region and Beyond by the Year 2030”.
The ZPCS is committed to achieving this vision by discharging its constitutional mandate, which is to protect society from criminal elements through the incarceration and rehabilitation of convicted persons and others who are lawfully required to be detained, and their reintegration into society, and the administration of prisons and correctional facilities.
Hence, to attain this requires and calls for each and every member of the service to effectively and efficiently discharge his or her duties.
Now given this backdrop, my vision is to see and have a fully staffed and resourced ZPCS that is capable of not only churning out improved service delivery in terms of sound, humane and safe incarceration of offenders, but to also have a competitively productive and business-oriented ZPCS that offers sustainable offender-rehabilitation programmes and reintegration systems to inmates.
This conception is driven by the fact that the ZPCS of today is no longer hinged on the secure incarceration of inmates, but in addition to safe and secure incarceration, it is now correctional in outlook and business-oriented.
Hence, the task is to rehabilitate inmates through production and skills transfer.
This will ensure that while inmates are serving their prison terms, they should be seen producing enough to feed themselves, producing surplus for the national granary and also gaining knowledge and skills that are critical for their livelihoods when they are discharged from our prisons and correctional institutions.
To achieve this requires continuous staff training and development as a way of capacitating and empowering our officers for them to deliver in line with the obtaining global prison management trends.
SM: The Second Republic has among its priorities prison reform to align your work with the dictates of the Constitution. What sort of reforms have you introduced since your appointment?
CGC: In line with the Constitution of 2013, the organisation rebranded from the Zimbabwe Prison Service (ZPS) to the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Service (ZPCS).
The inclusion of the correctional aspect witnessed the department taking a more pronounced reformist approach to prisons and correctional management system.
In this regard, credit goes to the first Commissioner-General of the ZPCS, now late Major-General Paradzai Zimondi, who laid the foundation which we are happy to be riding on.
Given such vital a foundation, the department’s name is now double-barrelled in that it provides for short-term protection of society through the provision of safe and sound custodian services, as well as long-term protection of society through correction, rehabilitation and empowering offenders through skills transfer to enhance their sources of livelihoods upon discharge from our institutions.
The ZPCS Five-Year Strategic Plan (20212025) Key Result Area 2 speaks to rehabilitation and reintegration with a goal to enhance rehabilitation programmes and reintegration processes. This goal is achieved by adopting crime-specific rehabilitation programmes and transforming the mind-set of offenders through imparting livelihood supporting skills such as vocational and technical training.
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