SA Crime Stats: Foreigners getting disproportionate blame

A senior government official has again done the generalised blaming of foreigners for crime. This kind of talk is plain xenophobic. The minister of police Nathi Nhleko made statements that amounts to little more than expressions of prejudice.

On a sensitive topic, I would have expected him to back his conclusion with specific data and facts. However his conclusions have amounted to little more than personal feelings of either himself or the report writer.

The conclusion that 'undocumented' foreigners are responsible for 'spikes' in crime is wrong on two points. Firstly documented individuals can be criminals. In fact high-value organised criminals are able to corruptly buy documents. On top of that they often work hand-in-glove with corrupt government officials.

To back my point, the former wife of an intelligence minister is in jail as we speak over a corrupt relationship with criminals. That foreigner was documented wasn't he? Czeck fugitive Rodovan Krejcir even had a gun in his cell, something he could not have acquired without corrupt connivence.  Several senior officials in the police have been said to be in his pay. He is so brazen that he has apparently been organising assassinations from his cell. In short, the worst kind of foreign criminals are documented and work closely with government officials.

The language that minister Nhleko used diverts attention from this group and instead focuses it on undocumented people whose crimes are by scale petty compared to those of the rich-criminal, government-official alliance. Even the highest echelons of power in this country has been linked to a very rich foreign family.

It is therefore my view that Nhlekos statement that the “influx of undocumented foreign nationals remains a serious issue, noting a spike in certain crimes in the areas where there is a large number of these individuals" is not a sincere and honest assessment. The corrupt relationship between rich criminals and government officials is a far much more serious challenge. Need I emphasise that a former police commissioner died on parole. Or that a friend of very top person have been convicted of corruption and is on medical parole.

The vast majority of undocumented individuals are doing their best to work for a living. Not quoting a percentage creates the impression that the whole group are criminals. The worst part is that it stokes xenophobic sentiment in townships where it may break out as murderous rampages.

Unless the South African government makes honest non-xenophobic assessment of crime, serious crime is not going to be tackled. However relations with neighbours are going to continue to be damaged. Countries to the north are beginning to direct their buying power elsewhere. Right now South African transport companies are facing a pinch because raw copper from the DRC and Zambia is increasingly being shipped via Dar es Salaam and Beira rather than Durban which was the norm. Countries are also increasingly buying manufactured goods from China and India and shipping them via Beira, Walvis Bay and Dar es Salaam.

Physically all these ports have always had an advantage over Durban because they are closer to the copper belt. However Durban has benefited from the enormous goodwill people have towards South Africa. Xenophobia, and very unhelpful statements by government officials are steadily eating away at this goodwill.

The South African government should be happy to see economic migrants make SA a top destination. If that stops happening it will mean that South Africa's economy is in serious trouble. By that stage South Africans will have to become the economic migrants. Of course a lot already are. A lot of the mines up north employ South Africans, though mostly skilled.

Rather knee jerk populist statements South African government officials should take time to think carefully before blaming ills on foreigners. Careless statements eventually cost lives. We have evidence of that from the very recent past.

African Pride: A Matter of Identity

Personally I am non-spiritual. I do not believe in anything claimed to be supernatural.

However a lot of people do. When they recount simple factual events, they often tag their beliefs along. As a result oral history in whatever form often gathers a huge shroud in myth and spirituality. It is not something unique to African culture.

Recently I have made it clear that I am proud of my African identity. To that end I have been discussing African people whose exploits are recounted in mythical terms.

You may have guessed right already. It wasn't long before I was accused of worshipping ancestors. The insinuation was that by talking about my ancestors I was associating with some form of evil. To be seen as good I had to dissociate myself from my ancestors.

Still, I won't be good enough until I start singing praises to the ancestors of others. What utter hogwash. Oops! Let me apologise to pigs for insulting them.

There are many histories shrouded in myth, mystery and spirituality. The very same people who call me evil for recounting African myth and mystery, turn around and start calling those other myths good entertainment.

Have they ever condemned stories of King Arthur the and Knights of the Round Table? Don't they watch movies about a god who throws his hammer to make thunderbolts? Don't they watch movies about children with magical powers fighting all sorts of wizards and monsters? We even know about super strong men who swing huge boulders on chains, like pieces of confetti. Not to mention loving a mythical thief, Robin Hood.

Recounting European, Greek and Roman mythology is regarded as a mark of knowledgeability.

Every day those myths are rammed down our throats as entertainment. They reinforce the identity and pride of the people who own them.

What about our own pride and identity? We are told to condemn our ancestors as evil witches and sorcerers and not talk about them. How are we going to boost our identity and pride?

If I may ask what do you make of ancestors who killed their sons in sacrifice? What do you make of a man who turned sticks into snakes, lit bushes from afar? Is that not wizardry and sorcery of the highest order?

If we can praise a man who parted a sea, why should we condemn a man who parted rock like Nehoreka?

The very moment that I writing this, there is a law of return that allows the children of Abraham to return to the land of their fathers. Do Walter Magaya, Makandiwa, Ezekiel Guti and the like qualify to go and live in Israel based on that law? They do not. They are not the descendants of the ancestor I mentioned above.

If they try to go and live in Israel today, Benjamin Netanyau will kick them out like a dirty mongrels. They are not the descendants of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Israel and David. They are the descendants of Nehoreka, Nkalange, Chaminuka, Muguni, Nyatsimba Mutota, Makate and the like.

While others are busy reinforcing their ancestry and claiming rights based on that, they are busy insulting and denigrating theirs. Can't they see they are giving away their identity and rights?

The right of return law claims land based on ancestry. Now tell me, if ancestry gives some the right to land, does it not mean condemning your own ancestry gives away the right to your own land?

I am proud to be Sena, Shona, Zimbabwean and African. I make no apologies for talking about my ancestors whether mythical or not. It is my identity. Case closed.

Syria: The Sadness of It All

If you think the reason why Syrians are walking from Aleppo/Kobane to Munich is because Bashar Assad is killing them, then there is a very serious problem with your reasoning powers.

Assad the father was dictator for decades, yet Syrians have never decided to walk to Munich. Bashar himself was a dictator for years after his father died. They never decided to put maximum distance between themselves and their country on foot.

They only decided to do that after Obama decided to send weapons into Middle East and destabilize the Syrian government. It is such typical poor, ignorant, presumptuous poorly judged foreign policy that we have come to expect from the Americans.

That poor judgement started when George Bush thought he could make Iraq a Western style democracy after letting Paul Bremmer run Iraq for six months. It boggles the mind to try and fathom how any intelligent person can even imagine that they can undo centuries if culture and sectarianism in just six months.

Habits, ways and values that have been set over centuries, someone thinks they can saunter in, and saunter out six months later leaving everything working according to their ways and values. The absurdity is laughable. It would make nice comedy if the results were not so tragic.

Instead of one big dictatorship, American policy has created a jigsaw patchwork of small dictatorships. Not even the Americans themselves know how to deal with them. If they do, why aren't they stopping the misery of Syrians.

To rub salt into the wound, the Americans and their allies sponsoring the destabilisation, do not want to help with the crisis they created. It is Europe and Canada that are having to foot the bill of helping the refugees. In the region it is Lebanon, Iran, Jordan, Afghanistan and Turkey that are bearing the worst of the refugee flood.

The allies that helped Americans sponsor what eventually became the Islamic State are nowhere to be seen. Significant American allies, Israel, Saudi Arabia are nowhere to be seen with helping the refugees.

After their attempts to create a rebel group allied to them failed with a host of groups that became the IS, the Americans are still trying to do the same thing with another rebel group. Do they have any guarantee that the people they are trying to train won't just feed into the rabid sectarian militia network. No they don't.

So why keep pumping weapons into the region? Why keep pumping military knowhow into the region? What is the purpose of doing those things besides callously making Syrians suffer more?