Editor,

RE: "Who is robbing Kigali residents?” (The New Times, April 17).

To the author, Kenneth Agutamba, who is robbing Kigali’s residents? Laughing out loud; thieves, of course! And some of these incidents are clearly inside jobs, but even if they weren’t, valuables always attract burglars and all manner of dishonest characters ready to make a few thousand francs from other people’s possessions.

This practice is additionally facilitated by a thriving market of even more dishonest people who may not engage directly in the thieving themselves (sometimes because they themselves are too cowardly to risk the consequences of being nabbed), but are all too eager to acquire such stolen goods at knockdown prices.

Any action to tamp down on such crime (given human nature, it can never be entirely eliminated), needs to come down hard on the fences/dealers in stolen property. It shouldn’t be too hard for our Police’s intelligence services to identify such people, their suppliers and networks and then shut their operations down. But this will be like the whack-a-mole game, as soon as you close off one network, another will arise to take its place.

As long as a market of dishonest people willing to buy other people’s stolen goods exists, there will always be those ready to take the risk to supply such a market. It is really an excellent example of market forces at their most basic, though for their victims this lesson in Economics 101 (the causal relationship between demand and supply) is understandably likely to fall flat!

Mwene Kalinda