The failures of Thabo Mbeki

I’m only really interested in politics with the same morbid curiosity that exists when you drive past an accident of indescribable awfulness so this is going to be my last blog on the subject for some time. I guess some small part of me is embarrassed to be a citizen of a country that is complicit in the subjugation of an entire nation and I never would have thought that South Africa would become an unashamed apologist for the Mugabe regime.

Thabo Mbeki’s presidency has been a failure. Putting aside his policy of quiet diplomacy in Zimbabwe that has seen an estimated 3 million refugees flood into South Africa as they leave behind a country in tatters while he continues to lie to the world about the crisis, or his criminal stupidity over the HIV/AIDS pandemic that has left South Africa with one of the highest infection rates in the world, or the simple failure of his government to adequately plan for the country’s energy needs that has quite literally seen the lights go out, I want to highlight the extent of his failure to maintain even basic law and order.

South Africa is one of the most murderous countries in the world. The latest official crime statistics put the number of murders for the year ending March 2005 at 18,793 or 51 people a day! My quick and dirty calculations show that since 2003, the same year as the Iraq invasion, South Africa has seen approximately 96,170** murders. According to the Iraq Body Count website the number of civilian deaths since the Iraq invasion stands at about 90,390. Whatever the exact numbers might be, I think it’s fair to say that SOUTH AFRICA IS EXPERIENCING THE SAME NUMBER OF CIVILIAN CASUALTIES AS IN IRAQ!!

Thabo Mbeki is woefully out of his depth. It’s time for this clown to leave the stage. It’s no longer funny.


** murder calculations
2003          21,553 (official statistics)
2004          19,824
2005          18,793
2006          18,000 (estimates)
2007          18,000
TOTAL        96,170
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