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The rise in organised crime, especially robbery and illegal drugs, highlighted by President Mnangagwa this week is serious and does need a collective and organised effort if it is not going to spin out of control.

Drugs, with organised supply chains now obvious, is a symptom of economic growth. When people are very poor you might find drug-related problems but these tend to be limited to illegal production and sale of alcohol and mbanje plants grown in backyards or secluded fields. 

The rise of abuse of methamphetamine, known as crystal meth or mutoriro, probably still an imported product although with the right ingredients can be made in backyard laboratories, the perennial problem of smuggled imported addictive cough syrups sold on the streets and now the growth of large batches of cocaine being carried into the country are signs that more people have money.

Imported drugs are no longer confined to the leafy suburbs but are available everywhere, along with a more sophisticated trade in mbanje. Intensified anti-smuggling operations along our very porous borders will help, but only moderately. The main drive has to be to cut demand, that is educating and persuading people not to abuse drugs.

The President stressed this point at Fr Emmanuel Ribeiro’s funeral, and that was not an odd place to do this. The late priest had, over his long and active life, done a great deal to work with people and to show them something better than lying in a gutter after an ephemeral thrill from abusing drugs. There was not only the example of his personal life, but his ability to get through to people, one reason why he was assigned to a prison chaplaincy in appallingly difficult times, and his willingness through his cultural and musical activities to show there were better and more constructive options.

Anyone who had the good fortune to witness Fr Ribeiro working late in the evening with a choir, sometimes in very sparse circumstances, and transmitting his enthusiasm would understand this and, of course, his one-on-one pastoral work must have brought many into a better life. One of his secrets was never to judge, never to condemn, but always to understand and show by example and advice how to live through suffering.

A lot of the educational thrust against drugs is not just warning people of the dangers, although that must be part of it, but also showing that there is a better way of overcoming what is sometimes a very difficult life when all the problems seem to overwhelm a person and escape, even for a few hours of drug-induced euphoria, becomes very tempting. 

This is a role that the Government can do little to advance. Families and churches obviously need to take the lead. 

The huge cultural shifts of recent decades, urbanisation and the like, do present challenges for families. Few traditions can survive unaltered, but the essential need for people to care can be maintained.

The rise of the new evangelical churches with their charismatic leaders does provide a more vivid and stronger community base, but the older stress on one-on-one pastoral care is sometimes missing and there can be an intolerance of failure and a reliance on miracles that can depress when they do not occur. 

The rise in violent crime is to a degree based on this same breakdown in caring for others, as people. Few robbers think of their victims as people and more and more as prey, and that they have an entitlement to gain wealth and possessions dishonestly if they cannot gain them honestly. Most people still have a sense of what is decent and proper, but there are obviously more who can no longer relate to the larger community.

Again more effort is needed to help each person take responsibility for their life, no matter how awful it is, and want to treat others as they wish to be treated. Again a challenge for families and churches, and a challenge for education.

But, regrettably, we need society to be able to act to deter. In a traditional culture this was easier, when everyone knew everyone in a community, and someone going off the rails could be challenged before they went too far. 

These days it needs both better policing, but acting within a community if it is to be effective. One reason violent crime was at low levels for so long in Zimbabwe was because almost everyone indulging in killing, robbery, rape and the like was caught, tried and punished. This made such crime largely worthless since it led to little more than a cell.

While the police have been making efforts to control such crime and hunt down those who follow that route, and there have been more arrests recently, this is backbreaking detective work that requires resources, and those resources have to be provided. 

But ordinary people must help. Once robbers combine into gangs others must know, or suspect, who they are. And if they sit back and do nothing then those gangs can if not flourish at least still operate. And these gangs seem able to gather intelligence. Many more recent robberies are of people and households who keep large sums of cash at home or work, and someone who knows them must be telling the robbers who they are, probably in return for a cut. 

Even the latest robbery by a gang, the well-planned assault on a long-distance bus, was done by four men whom someone must know have suddenly acquired money and phones and who probably have been boasting in their cups over what they did. 

The individual muggings of those walking in the evening, or a passenger in a mushikashika, need a different approach. People can take precautions, but more institutional efforts can help. Late evening legal buses would be a help, so a safe option to “lifts” is on offer, and in most suburbs the old neighbourhood watches need to be restored. 

Police used to patrol on the beat, and young constables often spent their first couple of years on a bicycle. When neighbourhood watches were better organised people could walk home from a bus stop in relative safety, and even if criminals were wandering the streets they were either deterred or could at least be identified by patrols. 

The cop on the bicycle beat or neighbourhood patrol cannot fight a gang of robbers in a car, but they might well be able to observe, call in armed back-up and generally make even that more extreme level of crime more difficult, and the gangs more susceptible to arrest. 

As with so much in society, both the drug problems and the crime problems need everyone to work together and start taking responsibility for themselves, their families and their neighbours. That is cultural and traditional and while very different methods are now required, the basic concept of communal responsibility still applies.