Although there is a fair amount of coverage in the media about the crime and corruption in South Africa, such as the arms deal debacle and crime against tourists, there is an underlying moral vacuum which is seldom mentioned. Being aware of the situation “on the ground” may give the reader a proper perspective of what exactly is happening here. Only property crime is dealt with here, as violent crime is a subject on it’s own.
What follows is actual happenings and observations during normal day to day life. These are not stories or fabrications or even exaggerations, although it may seem that these items are too far fetched to be real. They are real.
1. A train derailed this week. It was carrying coal for export, and was a few kilometers long. These trains are some of the longest in the world, up to three kilometers or more in length. The reason for the derailment was that people had stolen the bolts that hold the railway line to the sleepers, over many hundreds of meters, to sell for scrap metal.
2. Near Johannesburg, a train carrying bags of cement broke down due to mechanical failure. While it was being repaired, the local people stole all the bags of cement off the train. Not thieves in the normal sense, but everyone: men, women and children.
3. Near Hluhluwe game reserve is a TV and radio broadcasting station. It has a standby generator to keep it on air during a power failure. Local people cut through the fence, cut through the steel cage around the diesel tank, and carried off, in buckets, 2000 litres of diesel. A guard was hired to patrol the site at night. They came again during the day and stole another 2000 litres that same week. There are now guards there 24/7 at a cost of R10,000 a month.
4. People are breaking into electrical substations and stealing the transformer oil out of the large, high voltage transformers, which police say they are selling as “cooking oil.” This results in the transformer overheating and burning out, and whole areas lose electricity supply, including hospitals, restaurants and factories.
5. On windy days, fires are started intentionally in the farmlands to burn out white farmers who are slow in relinquishing their farms. The fires are uncontrollable, and sweep over thousands of hectares of tinder dry grasslands, gumtree plantations and sugar cane fields, destroying everything. People, black and white, lose their lives and possessions in these fires. On Saturday this week the local radio station reported that there were 75 different fires raging simultaneously. 24 people are confirmed dead, and one firefighting plane went down, killing the New Zealander pilot. The smoke plumes were clearly visable in the satellite weather photos.
6. Telephone wires are systematically stripped to get the copper, which is sold as scrap metal. People have now given up, and only use cellphones in some areas, as their land line was never working.
7. A contractor who was building 30 metre cellphone masts offloaded an entire sectional 30 metre mast on a Friday, intending to erect the mast with a large crane starting on the Monday. When he returned on Monday the entire mast had been stolen.
8. People have had their cars impounded at the police pound for parking illegally or some other traffic offence. When they arrive a day or so later to collect their car, it has been stripped, inside the police pound yard, and only the shell of the car remains. This is a very common occurance.
9. A number of kilometers of railway line track was stolen near Johannesburg this last month.
10. Large electrical cables supplying suburbs with electricity, are dug up out of the ground and stolen, plunging large areas into darkness. The thieves do this to a “live” cable by laying the cable over a rock and hitting it with another large rock. This cable is sold for scrap. They may get R700 for the cable as scrap, but it costs in the region of R100,000 or more to replace the cable, plus the labour and time to do the job. Often these cables are pulled out of the ground with a large vehicle, removing hundreds of meters of cable.
11. Cats eyes, the reflectors built into the road surface to aid motorists in the mist, are stolen. Some rural areas have almost none left on the road for kilometers.
12. Any material left on a building site is stolen within hours, even if locked behind a razorwire fence. Only an armed guard can keep it safe.
13. Businesses normally have a razorwire fence, an armed response alarm system, cctv cameras and infrared beams in the yard. And they are still robbed regularly.
14. Water meters, which each house has where the water mains enter their property from the street, are broken off and stolen for the value of the brass they are made out of. Usually 4 or five are stolen in quick succession, and home owners wake up in the dead of night with a loud hissing sound and rain falling on their house from a cloudless sky. This happens regularly. The meters are