The 2010 world cup has come and gone. The euphoria and sense of wellbeing that was created by this event was truly amazing. It made one proud to be a South African. The fact that we managed to make a success in spite of all the doom and gloom before the event is a very big feather in the cap of South Africa.
However, I feel very badly let down as a citizen of this country. Granted we have some beautiful state of the art stadiums but we are still left with the following.
Poverty and unemployment will most probably get a lot worse. We have beautiful stadiums but millions of people are hungry and live in sub human dwellings. Education and health services are in bad shape. As a nation we somehow seem to have a penchant for compounding the ills that beset this country.
Crime is rampant. I have got the following statistics from http://www.nationmaster.com
We have 21,553 murders, 393,959 burglaries, 52,425 rapes. Many burglaries and rapes are never reported as many of the victims have no faith in our law enforcement authorities or the judicial system. The general feeling is why waste your time in reporting something that you know is not going to get anything done about it. One can only think what these actual stats should be.
The conviction rate for murders is about 11%. If you put this into actual figures what you get is about 19,000 murders that have not been solved. Only about 5% of rape cases ever end in a conviction. This means that you have just fewer than 50,000 rape cases that have never been solved. If you take these figures for a three year period it will mean that you have approximately 57,000 murder and 150,000 rape cases that remain unsolved. The sobering thought is that the perpetrators of these crimes are happily living amongst our people. I will not go to the burglaries as the statistics are even worse.
So what has changed to help improve the lives of our people? You tell me.
Butch Hannan