TAXI OPERATORS NOW WANT TO CARRY GUNS

 MANZINI – Taxi operators in Manzini are working in fear and they want government to give them provisional firearm licences to own guns so they can defend themselves during hijackings.

Simunye Swaziland Taxi and For-Hire Association Chairman Enoch Nkambule said this during an interview yesterday.
He said following the murder of their colleague, Prince Ncabeni, who was based in Mbabane, their members also feared for their lives.
The prince, who ran a pirate taxi business in Mbabane, was murdered allegedly by people who hired his taxi on Monday night last week.

His body was found lying next to the road at Nhlambeni, three hours after he had been hired by an unknown man in Mbabane. Nkambule said they had come up with options on how to work in the future and avoid being hijacked and murdered.
“First, we would like government to consider issuing provisional firearm licences to taxi operators so that they could defend themselves from thugs. The provisional licence should have a condition that the gun would be taken from those who would abuse it,” the chairman said.

He said another option, which they were looking into, was that customers should show their identification (ID) cards to their colleagues and tell them their destination before they take off.
He said this tactic would help because if a taxi man went missing, his colleagues would know who hired him and where they had gone. 

“Another option we are considering is to rope in the police by reporting to them first when we are hired by unknown clients. At the police, the client can register his ID, destination and cellphone number together with a relative,” Nkambule said.

He said if there were other available job opportunities, they were going to experience an exodus of their members as they were no longer comfortable. “We used to experience such incidents a while ago and we thought it had passed. However, following the prince’s incident, we fear for our lives,” he said.
The chairman said customers who would not comply with their plea to produce their IDs and destinations to their colleagues, would risk being stranded as they would not ferry them.

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