IT IS an axiom of medicine that disease is most effectively combated when it is identified early and therapy begins before it takes a fatal hold.
The same is true for most social scourges – Aids, unemployment, debt and violence.
Nelson Mandela has acknowledged in retirement that he was slow to declare a public war on HIV/Aids when he was president. He has worked hard in his later years to address that backlog, directing personal energy and funds he is able to marshal towards the fight.
His once excellent aide, Parks Mankahlana, who is presumed to have died of an Aids-related illness, used to explain to those of us working close to Mandela that his culture made it impossible for him to discuss issues of sexuality and contraception in public.
Eventually, he accepted that he just had to do it.
Though I do not remember the occasion, I have a mental image of Madiba the first time he used the word “condom” in a speech. It was clearly hard for him, but, as Justice Edwin Cameron has said, things might have been different if Mandela had not dodged the difficult challenge for as long as he did.
The same could be said of Thabo Mbeki’s approach to unemployment. In the early years of his influence – perhaps while he was still deputy president – Mbeki refused to acknowledge the scale of post-apartheid unemployment.
For a long time he argued that the answer lay in the accelerated industrialisation of South Africa and that unemployment could be curbed by training the jobless to participate in the knowledge economy or hi-tech industries.
The result was a matrix of policies and institutions such as our expensive but largely ineffective Sector Education and Training Authorities. But unemployment continued to balloon because the initial problem inherited from Bantu education was beyond the scope of a borrowed first- world policy.
Mbeki had a tendency to ridicule when arguments got hot; I recall him saying once that if there were as many people looking for work as the statistics suggested, he would have seen them walking the streets as he criss-crossed the country.
In much the same way, he challenged the disappointing figures on GDP growth by pointing to the number of cranes he saw as he travelled about in South Africa.
Denying the challenge of unemployment among the unskilled and undereducated, cost valuable years that could have been spent crafting simpler policies which recognised the structure of the problem and sought to create millions of jobs for people who have little to offer but the power of their muscles or the nimbleness of their fingers.
As with Aids, we’re onto unemployment now and even ready to challenge the self-interest of the trade unions and subsidise employers willing to give young people a first step on a career path.
But we could have been further down that road if we had tackled the problem frankly from the start.
Now we have President Jacob Zuma telling us: “South Africa is not a violent country.”
That is the quote that hangs in the air, which the sound bite people will remember.
As with Mbeki’s approach to unemployment, of course, it is not really that simple. There was a context to Zuma’s comment. But the sound bite will be taken as the essence of his opinion, which does us no favour because it allows those responsible for the management of our violent streak to relax when, in fact, they should be in red alert mode.
Zuma did talk about government initiatives to fight crime and he did appeal to ordinary people to accept a role in the project, but he got through his speech without mentioning the recent examples of our violent streak that everyone is talking about and which concern South Africans not privileged to live behind the same security barriers that protect him and his circle.
“We also dare not portray our beautiful country as an inherently violent place to live in. South Africa is not a violent country – it is certain people in our country who are violent. By and large, we are peace-loving people,” he said.
It is, of course, true that not all South Africans are violent, but too many of us are. The numbers are coming down, but according to the latest police statistics, we murdered, tried to kill, assaulted or raped nearly half a million people in a year – 469303 to be precise.
Of those victims, more than 50000 were children – 793 of them murdered, 23000 assaulted and 25000 raped or otherwise molested.
Add to that the prevalence of road rage, a police force so on edge that they can kill 34 miners in an instant or beat an insolent taxi driver to death and teenagers who feel they must eviscerate the victim of their gang rape.
We are not alone: India has seen the same phenomenon, American gun violence is out of hand and Britain faces a plague of knife attacks.
We are in bad company, but we are violent.
Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel, dared to say it: “South Africa is an angry nation. We are on the precipice of something very dangerous with the potential of not being able to stop the fall.
“The level of anger and aggression is rising. This is an expression of deeper trouble from the past that has not been addressed. We have to be more cautious about how we deal with a society that is bleeding and breathing pain.”
Zuma must dare to hear what she, many others in our society and even the carefully managed police statistics are saying: we are a violent nation.
Can Zuma – or you – really say, as Mbeki did with Aids, that he knows nobody who has been a victim of South Africa’s dangerous violent streak?
Brendan Boyle is editor of the Daily Dispatch
Insight: Statistics don’t lie – we are indeed a violent nation
The same is true for most social scourges – Aids, unemployment, debt and violence.
Nelson Mandela has acknowledged in retirement that he was slow to declare a public war on HIV/Aids when he was president. He has worked hard in his later years to address that backlog, directing personal energy and funds he is able to marshal towards the fight.
His once excellent aide, Parks Mankahlana, who is presumed to have died of an Aids-related illness, used to explain to those of us working close to Mandela that his culture made it impossible for him to discuss issues of sexuality and contraception in public.
Eventually, he accepted that he just had to do it.
Though I do not remember the occasion, I have a mental image of Madiba the first time he used the word “condom” in a speech. It was clearly hard for him, but, as Justice Edwin Cameron has said, things might have been different if Mandela had not dodged the difficult challenge for as long as he did.
The same could be said of Thabo Mbeki’s approach to unemployment. In the early years of his influence – perhaps while he was still deputy president – Mbeki refused to acknowledge the scale of post-apartheid unemployment.
For a long time he argued that the answer lay in the accelerated industrialisation of South Africa and that unemployment could be curbed by training the jobless to participate in the knowledge economy or hi-tech industries.
The result was a matrix of policies and institutions such as our expensive but largely ineffective Sector Education and Training Authorities. But unemployment continued to balloon because the initial problem inherited from Bantu education was beyond the scope of a borrowed first- world policy.
Mbeki had a tendency to ridicule when arguments got hot; I recall him saying once that if there were as many people looking for work as the statistics suggested, he would have seen them walking the streets as he criss-crossed the country.
In much the same way, he challenged the disappointing figures on GDP growth by pointing to the number of cranes he saw as he travelled about in South Africa.
Denying the challenge of unemployment among the unskilled and undereducated, cost valuable years that could have been spent crafting simpler policies which recognised the structure of the problem and sought to create millions of jobs for people who have little to offer but the power of their muscles or the nimbleness of their fingers.
As with Aids, we’re onto unemployment now and even ready to challenge the self-interest of the trade unions and subsidise employers willing to give young people a first step on a career path.
But we could have been further down that road if we had tackled the problem frankly from the start.
Now we have President Jacob Zuma telling us: “South Africa is not a violent country.”
That is the quote that hangs in the air, which the sound bite people will remember.
As with Mbeki’s approach to unemployment, of course, it is not really that simple. There was a context to Zuma’s comment. But the sound bite will be taken as the essence of his opinion, which does us no favour because it allows those responsible for the management of our violent streak to relax when, in fact, they should be in red alert mode.
Zuma did talk about government initiatives to fight crime and he did appeal to ordinary people to accept a role in the project, but he got through his speech without mentioning the recent examples of our violent streak that everyone is talking about and which concern South Africans not privileged to live behind the same security barriers that protect him and his circle.
“We also dare not portray our beautiful country as an inherently violent place to live in. South Africa is not a violent country – it is certain people in our country who are violent. By and large, we are peace-loving people,” he said.
It is, of course, true that not all South Africans are violent, but too many of us are. The numbers are coming down, but according to the latest police statistics, we murdered, tried to kill, assaulted or raped nearly half a million people in a year – 469303 to be precise.
Of those victims, more than 50000 were children – 793 of them murdered, 23000 assaulted and 25000 raped or otherwise molested.
Add to that the prevalence of road rage, a police force so on edge that they can kill 34 miners in an instant or beat an insolent taxi driver to death and teenagers who feel they must eviscerate the victim of their gang rape.
We are not alone: India has seen the same phenomenon, American gun violence is out of hand and Britain faces a plague of knife attacks.
We are in bad company, but we are violent.
Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel, dared to say it: “South Africa is an angry nation. We are on the precipice of something very dangerous with the potential of not being able to stop the fall.
“The level of anger and aggression is rising. This is an expression of deeper trouble from the past that has not been addressed. We have to be more cautious about how we deal with a society that is bleeding and breathing pain.”
Zuma must dare to hear what she, many others in our society and even the carefully managed police statistics are saying: we are a violent nation.
Can Zuma – or you – really say, as Mbeki did with Aids, that he knows nobody who has been a victim of South Africa’s dangerous violent streak?
Brendan Boyle is editor of the Daily Dispatch
Would you like to comment on this article?
Register (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
Trending Now
Latest Videos