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Patriotic fervour cannot hide... |
Patriotic fervour cannot hide the reality of violent crime
IT IS seven o' clock on a warm summer's evening and the braai fire is burning nicely. The kids are watching a video and you have a cold beer in your hand. Your wife is sitting next to the pool chatting to your teenage daughter. Suddenly, faces appear at the locked front gate. A man leaps over and waves a gun in your face, telling you to get into the house and open the safe. Two other men are by this time in the garden. Your wife and daughter scream and are bundled inside by one of the men. The other is in the room with the younger children waving a large knife around. You beg them to just take what they want and not to harm your wife and children. They have different ideas. After ransacking the house they tie you up with electric flex while they take turns to rape your wife and teenage daughter etc etc. This horrific description of a typical day in the lives of ordinary Gauteng folk has upset the president, who has lashed out at those who claim that South Africa is a murderous and violent country. "What message are we sending out to society and the outside world?" he asks. If you are a victim of crime the government would obviously prefer that you shut up about it because it might send a bad image to foreign investors. This patriotic thought was no doubt foremost in the mind of the authorities when they kept quiet about a recent mass robbery of tourists in Dunkeld. Then one of the victims phoned a radio station to whinge and the cat was out of the bag. Maybe we should give tourists visas only on condition that they don't tell anybody when they are mugged or robbed. Anyway, at least we no longer need to tell foreigners about our shocking crime problem because they are experiencing it themselves.
While I can appreciate President Mandela's frustrations at having to answer questions in parliament about his government's ineffectual action on crime, one has to wonder whether it is the critics of the government who should be accused of callousness or whether that accusation shouldn't be levelled at the president. Mandela seems more concerned with his party's political reputation than he does with the horrific and growing crime problem that those of us who don't have the luxury of a 24-hour bodyguard have to contend with daily. There is no doubt that the government has been successful in reducing political violence. The problem is that we have swapped one sort of crime for another - and that is no cause for celebration. Few would question the government's commitment to combating crime, but fighting talk needs to be translated into action. ALTHOUGH many people are clamouring for the reintroduction of the death penalty as the ultimate deterrent, the government believes it knows better than the public on this one and refuses to return to barbarism. Meanwhile, barbarism affects all of us as the threat of rape or murder becomes no longer a matter of "if" but "when".
Just before he gave up his position as president of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, a picture of Roy Andersen appeared on the pages of Business Report wearing what many assumed to be the uniform of a traffic cop. THOSE of us with a little more of the old grey matter between our ears know that you don't get that many medals just for ticketing speeding cars (not even in Delmas) and that Roy was actually modelling the uniform of an army brigadier. The puzzling thing was, why? If that photograph had appeared in a military magazine it wouldn't have raised eyebrows, but the financial pages of a daily newspaper? The brigadier is far too canny a campaigner for the photograph to have appeared by accident, so we must assume that the Andersen publicity machine is simply sending an advance warning to Liberty Life executives that their boots should be polished and their kit neatly laid out at the end of their beds by early March. I am told strategy meetings at Liberty might take on a new look too. Liberty executives will have to get used to the fact that the tea pot, milk jug and sugar bowl represent the life insurance salesmen and the tea cups the public. The problem is how to get the tea into the cups without the enemy plate of ginger biscuits getting to them first.
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