I don't know what's worse about Jacob Zuma's campaign song "Bring Me My Machine Gun", the implied violence or the sheer laziness of not being able to go and get his own sodding gun.
I've said before that a lot of the negativity about South Africa is undue, the crime rate is very high, but the murder rate has been falling staedily for over a decade and is now about half of what it once was. The economy isn't a basket case like it was towards the end of the Apartheid era and there is a growing black middle class.
Yet electing someone like Zuma puts all that at risk.
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there is a growing black middle class.
Only I suspect at the expense of a shrinking white middle class. As for falling crime I would think that statistics have long departed from realty along with the ability of the state to even collect them reliably.
On the plus side, at least ten years from now, no one can 'how were we to know he was a loon'?
"On the plus side, at least ten years from now, no one can 'how were we to know he was a loon'?"Why not, they did with Mugabe.
"As for falling crime I would think that statistics have long departed from realty along with the ability of the state to even collect them reliably."Possibly but homicide stats are the hardest of all crime figures to massage.
"Possibly but homicide stats are the hardest of all crime figures to massage."
Who checks the stats? You're writing as if South Africa was not, effectively, a one-party state whose president has recently been relieved of the burden of standing trial on good prima facie evidence because he's . . er . . leader of the ANC. Not that we're that much better. Even Jacqui Smith's statistics are not always completely reliable.
Umbongo- I haven't heard anyone seriously claim that SA murder stats are faked and if they were going to fake them then why not also fake things like robbery statistics which are rising but are easier to massage out of the picture?
Though I agree with the dropping of charges against Zuma has been a farce as the man is quite clearly crooked.
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