Today (15 October 2008) there was yet another three year old girl found raped, murdered and dumped in the veld.
Current statistics say that there are 2 ATM machines blown up in South Africa every day! There is about one cash van robbery a week. These are always violent. Those people are of the underground, organised and ruthless. Rumour has it that the syndicates are run by Nigerians. Same as the car hi-jacking syndicates. They are usually after hi-demand models but have “a little fun” while they are at it. But not all. One member of our house church survived an attempted hi-jacking by your regular Cape Town locals.
Every year the Police publish statistics that show that crime is on the decline. That may be so, but the levels are still unacceptably high! I deleted the latest crime statistics document in preparation for leaving the past behind me, but you can get hold of it on the web if you really want to check the figures. One comment I heard on the radio was that the average police inspector in SA has about 100 cases on his/her desk at any given time. In the UK there are 3 inspectors to a case and they deal with at most 3 cases at a time. The issue is that the police here are out numbered, out gunned, underpaid and powerless. Even if they wanted to they are not able cope with the situation. Until a short while ago our wonderfully liberal constitution protected the individual's rights to such a degree that the police were not permitted to stop a person in the street and ask to see what was in the black plastic bag they were carrying. This just opened up the door for the casual burglar to break in, grab a bag of stuff and walk out of the house. If he was not caught inside the house he was untouchable. The other thing of course was that the moment you shot anyone, even a burglar in your own house, holding a gun to you wife's head, it was standard procedure to charge you with murder. You may eventually be acquitted on self-defence, but boy they will first drag you through hell.
Conviction rates in SA for murder are 12.5% (www.news24.com). “South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world and one of the lowest conviction rates” (www.usaid.gov/sa/uss01.html).
To compound the situation on the ground (paragraph above), the politicians are either too corrupt or too busy building their own kingdoms and lining their own pockets to pay attention to the problems of the country. I'm not sure how it works in civilized countries but here politicians don't deal with traffic and transport issues (btw. Public transport is mostly unreliable and in some cases fatal: many a person has been robbed and thrown off a moving train; in case you were wondering, you die when you hit the ground at 60-70Km/h). The politicians just put on their sirens and scream down the shoulder of the highway or between the lanes and the public just have to make way. There is no political will to address the problems of the country. I take my hat off to some of the politicians, for example the Minister of Finance, Mr Trevor Manual, the Cape Town Mayor and Leader of the Democratic Alliance and, of course, ex-president Nelson Mandela. There are many other issues which I did not even mention (like the power crisis, entirely brought on by lack of maintenance and planning on the part of those running the utility and those in government, who, in the hight of the blackouts, gave themselves millions of Rands in bonuses!). If you live in South Africa you have your own list, I'm sure. If you don't, then just google “crime south africa” or open up www.iol.co.za or www.news24.com and on any given day you'll read about a number of the issues mentioned above.
For the sake of those who stay behind, those who still have hope for the country, and there are plenty such people, thank goodness) I sincerely hope that the end of the “honeymoon” period of the New South Africa will bring an earnest focus of attention and resources to effectively address these problems, but I'm not gonna wait around for it to happen.
People often say to me “What was it that pushed you over the edge?” About 4 years ago I was at work and my wife called, her voice thick with panic. She said “We've been burgled!” That brought the reality of the situation in SA home to stay. For years after that I was highly suspect of anyone walking around the streets in the residential area. You feel violated and nauseous when you think strangers can just break the window, bend away the burglar bars, enter your house and take what they want. To this day I go cold when my mobile rings and I see it's my wife calling. The next scare was when they started inducing some or other gas through the bedroom windows at night to knock the occupants out. Many a house was totally cleaned out while the occupants were blissfully asleep and unaware. I consider them lucky because if you woke up and confronted them there was a good chance you would be killed.
Later a small business owner a block down the street from us was shot in the leg and stomach. He obviously fell to the ground but the gun jammed when they put it to his head. By then the neighbours started coming out to see what the shooting was about and the robbers sped away with a couple of thousand rand. In another incident a nurse three houses away from us came home one morning from night shift and was held at knife point. Two men broke in, caught her, ransacked the house and found ATM cards and warned her not to give them the wrong pin numbers else they would kill her. So while the one went to empty out the family's accounts, the other held the woman hostage.
More recently our neighbour diagonally across the street from us had his van torched one night. We awoke around 00H45 to shouting in the street, an eerie yellow light and sounds of glass crashing and explosions. I got up and looked out the window to see the car engulfed in an inferno, flames liking the roof of the house. About 15 minutes later the fire brigade arrived and put out the fire. It's very effective, that machine, I must say. But the car was totally gutted and the outside wall of the house was black, the window shattered and the house full of black soot.
The final incident close to home was when I heard of an armed cash van that was robbed a block away from our house, so I called my wife to warn her to stay away. She said she knows about it, she and the kids were driving down that same road on their way home minutes after it occurred. Two bystanders were shot, not fatally as far as I know.
These are the incidents that fed my resolution and determination to get out of the country. You have got to ask yourself whether this is the kind of environment you want your children to grow up in. If you feel happy that you can shield them from what's going on around them then fine. What about competing for a place at university? What about fair competition for jobs? What about a non-biased foundation for their lives ahead? If you reckon it's pretty much the same in SA as anywhere else in the world, the fine. As for me, I visited Australia and saw that life was SO much better over there. One cannot imagine that a civilized country can be so different if one has not experienced it oneself! Yes, Australia also has paedophiles and murderers and corrupt politicians, but over there crimes are followed by public outcry, full scale manhunts and merciless prosecution!
When I was a kid we used to play “cow-boys & crooks,” imitating the western movies we saw in the drive-in. When my kids were around 5 years old (10 years ago) they played “Burglary & Kidnapping.” That is just too close to reality for comfort!
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