For a man who had been held up at gunpoint the previous evening, Mmusi Maimane was on surprisingly good form, when I met him in Cape Town this month. Maimane, one of South Africa’s leading opposition politicians, was in a suburban restaurant when armed men entered, forced all the diners to lie on the floor and robbed them.
“I didn’t sleep too well last night,” he conceded, before pointing out that poorer South Africans are the main victims of crime. “On an average day 67 South Africans are murdered and the conviction rate is below 15 per cent,” he notes.
A high crime rate is not surprising in a country where the official rate of unemployment is 34.5 per cent and youth unemployment is over 60 per cent. Power cuts are a part of everyday life and reached up to nine hours a day in Johannesburg, the commercial capital, this summer. After cross-country riots a year ago, there is a fear that South Africa is primed for further civil unrest. Thabo Mbeki, a former president, recently warned that South Africa could soon face the equivalent of an Arab Spring.