Listening to Radio 702 and Clement Manyathela taking calls from listeners who have fallen victim to violent and abhorrent crime, almost every caller identified as black, and detailing their awful experiences. This after a Zandspruit incident where mobs of vigilantes killed a number of “suspects”. This is nothing new as such incidence of vigilant mobs taking the “law” into their own hands seems as common as crime itself.
Crime in SA accounts for more than 20,000 deaths a year — including women and children, that’s 384 people a week violently killed. A staggering 42,289 rapes were reported to the police in 2020, and estimates are that actual rapes could be more than double this figure. “Reported” cases are more than 15 rapes a day. Other violent crime in SA decimates communities and lives at an unimaginable rate.
Yet the president of the country in his weekly newsletter chooses to castigate another country embroiled in a defensive war for more than 3,000 deadly rockets fired at civilian populations with no other intent but to kill civilians. The president looking through a one-way mirror is only able to see one side of a conflict, and closes his mind to the old axiom of “three sides to every story” — “yours, mine and somewhere between the truth”. To date a total of 265 people killed (in both sides) in the conflict that the president chooses to condemn, that’s less than a week’s crime deaths in his own backyard
Being president of the country, he has much to answer for, the state of almost every facet of state management has reached the lowest point in history — crime, corruption, service delivery, health care and education are all dysfunctional. The rollout of vaccinations has been a complete botch up from procurement to implementation — on Wednesday only something in the region of 45,000 vaccinations for the whole country. Zimbabwe and Rwanda have far exceeded these numbers.
But it doesn’t stop there. While taking the moral high ground by criticising Israel, he and his ANC government were complicit in violating the country’s stand on the export of armaments to countries guilty of human rights violations by allowing lethal arms to be sold to Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries. In this conflict many, many more innocent civilians including thousands of children have been killed, probably with the help of SA-supplied weaponry.
Mr President if you choose to take the moral high ground perhaps you would be well advised to look in your own backyard first and that goes for the rest of your ANC comrades too.
Allan Wolman
Tel Aviv, Israel
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