I genuinely don’t understand. Why would our minister of tourism Lindiwe Sisulu say that, “in the 27 years of government, there have only been three [tourist] deaths — that is a record of safety and that is a record that we would like to keep. And we want to attract tourists to SA. That is our job. We assure them that SA is safe.”
There are three questionable assertions in Sisulu’s statement, which was made after the murder of a 67-year-old German tourist in Numbi, Mpumalanga, last week. The first is the astonishing claim that there have been only three tourist deaths in the entirety of our existence as a democratic country. The second, the equally mind-boggling declaration that SA is safe. And the third is the characterisation of what has turned out to be 27 years of looting and criminal mismanagement by a corrupt political party as “government”. That’s really stretching the meaning of the word.
The claim that SA is “safe” is so ludicrous, it barely needs refuting. News24 succinctly did so, however, by pointing out that, between April and June this year alone, almost 70 people were murdered each day in our safe country. That’s a total of 6,424 people — an 11.5% increase on the year before.
“A total of 9,516 [rape] cases were reported to police between April and June,” the news site reported. “During the same period, police recorded 35,233 cases of robbery with aggravating circumstances. In addition, 1,707 cases of sexual assault were recorded.”
Let me juxtapose these stark, frightening numbers with Sisulu’s soothing encomium. “It is not correct that South Africans are predisposed to crime. We are a peace-loving nation that ended one of the worst crimes in modern-day humanity, the apartheid system, peacefully.”
Ah, that warm glow of safety. I feel positively Scandinavian.
Lindiwe Sisulu’s statements on the recent murder of a German tourist are so far divorced from reality that she may as well be speaking of a different country.
— What it means:
We are so peace-loving that our ex-president — he of the firepool and the friendly chuckle — happily characterises last year’s rioting and looting in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, or “unrest” as I see we’re calling it in some circles, as a positive demonstration of solidarity by people who were angry at the court’s contempt ruling against him. With, of course, the intimation that it could happen again.
To remind you, this event, of “people going against judges because of the decision they made”, to quote Jacob Zuma, ended up with more than 350 dead people, and billions of rands in damages. Give peace a chance indeed.
So, as much as I want tourists to visit, I think Sisulu, and by extension her pay-as-you-go political party, is perhaps focusing on the wrong bit when she says “incidents of crime directed at tourists and tourism products tarnish SA’s reputation and create a negative perception of our country and destination and, in turn, impact on both the visitor experience and visitor numbers”.
I’m sure — well, fairly sure — that she doesn’t intend it to come across this way, but it does read rather as if the main problem with crime in SA is that it makes us look bad. Rather than that our citizens live in fear, and that women don’t dare walk the streets at night ... I was going to say, women don’t dare walk the streets alone at night, but that is, of course, a counterintuitively comfortable cliché that suggests they’d be safer if they were accompanied by men. Sadly, we know this would probably make it even more dangerous.
Let’s just pick up on this bit of Sisulu’s statement. “It is not correct that South Africans are predisposed to crime. We are a peace-loving nation that ended one of the worst crimes in modern-day humanity, the apartheid system, peacefully.”
This is such a telling statement, and it reveals much that is bad about the ANC. Without wanting to take away from the magnitude of that accomplishment, if you’re reaching that far back for an example of the one time you fought crime and won, we are in deep, deep trouble.
And yet, as our public institutions crumble around our heads, as crime spikes, and as the proof of ANC criminality keeps pouring out like the rivers of effluvia coursing through the water systems of many of our cities, we can expect more of this deflection. And the step we’re going through now is the creation of new enemies to take citizens’ minds off the real enemy, our governing party.
Speaking of sewage: this doesn’t have a lot to do with the theme of this column, but I thought I’d just cheer you up by reminding you of the latest Green Drop report findings into the state of wastewater treatment in SA. As academic website The Conversation notes: “More than a third — 334 wastewater treatment works (39%) out a total of 955 systems — are classified as critical. In the 2013 report the number of critical systems was 248 (29%). In addition, only 22 municipal and one private wastewater treatment works achieved Green Drop status in the 2022 report. The risk classification of municipal treatment works deteriorated from medium (65.4%) to high risk (70.1%) between 2013 and 2021.”
Sisulu, incidentally, was minister of human settlements, water & sanitation from 2014 to 2021.
But let’s return to the extraordinary claim at the heart of her statement on the recent killing of a German tourist. Or, as Sisulu describes it on Twitter, the recent “unfortunate experience”.
East Coast Radio is carrying this version: “SA is indeed a safe place. So far, since the dawn of democracy, only three tourists have died in the country. One was 61, who was murdered in Cape Town. The other one was a tourist who fell down a mountain in an accident.”
This reads like the opening of a short story. The details are weird. “One was 61, one fell down a mountain.”
It looks as if those spurious data points were put in to give the impression that Sisulu actually knows what she’s talking about. Alas, a simple Google search reveals she doesn’t. Results from a search News24 did for murders (I could do my own, but credit to them for thinking of it as a story) ranged from “Dec 1997 — A German tourist was stabbed to death on New Year’s Eve in front of his two children in Durban”, to “Jul 2019 — A Ukrainian tourist was stabbed to death for his backpack during a hike in Hout Bay”, via “Oct 2018 — A Chilean backpacker was found murdered in Ladysmith after going missing in Bergville”.
The results also included deaths by accidents, and this one struck me as poignant. “Dec 2003 — Eight British tourists were killed in a crash after a South African tried to commit suicide by running in the road in Drakensberg.”
Our government should be a little more concerned about the state of mind of our citizens, rather than the marketability of Brand SA.
We appear to now be in a phase where politicians will say anything that springs to mind to evade immediate accountability
Could Sisulu really believe that only three tourists have died in SA in the past 27 years? Or is she being selectively quoted?
Let’s not forget her statement after the death of ANC stalwart Jessie Duarte: “I was invited to Russia, and while I was there I tried to get medication for her. I succeeded but arrived home too late.”
When quizzed on that illegal action, she said: “I did not put it in my pocket, it’s in my head. I brought in my mind a new medicine that we could try on Jessie. I didn’t put it in my bag as it is administered by doctors, I’m not a doctor.”
This is not a person given to clear communications.
The official government media statement about the “unfortunate experience” of the tourist’s murder doesn’t mention the magical number of three, but most media reports carry some version of Sisulu’s statement. The Polity site, as another example, has: “She said the incident was isolated, claiming that the German man was the third tourist death in the country in 27 years. ‘The only murder we have had — the Dewani case (Anni Hindocha’s murder) — was a planned hit on the woman, and the other one was an accident in Cape Town.’”
Why would a government minister say something so wildly incorrect, and so easily disproved? We’re all used to the false promises of politicians, not to mention the outright lies, but this is on another level. We appear to now be in a phase where politicians will say anything that springs to mind to evade immediate accountability. Tomorrow’s accountability, it seems, will take care of itself. If tomorrow ever arrives.
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