Mbeki hits back on crime stats

2004-10-01 21:50

Cape Town - President Thabo Mbeki lashed out on Friday at the media and others for questioning the integrity and reliability of the crime statistics released by the South African Police Service.

Writing in his weekly newsletter on the African National Congress' website, ANC Today, he cited a newspaper which published an editorial headed "Crime stats lack credibility".

The editorial had said, among other things, that the statistics were not believed by ordinary South Africans, who experienced the realities of everyday life in this country.

Nor did the "massaged figures" carry any weight overseas, where the perception remained that South Africa was one of the world's crime capitals.

Another newspaper had carried an article headed "Police statistics on child abuse do not reflect reality, activists warn".

'Explain how Interpol gets its figures'

Mbeki said the author of the article on rape was described by the newspaper as "an internationally-recognised expert on sexual violence and post-exposure prophylaxis".

This "internationally-recognised expert" had written, among other things, that South Africa had the highest rates of rape in the world, according to Interpol.

"If she is telling the truth that Interpol has said what she says it said, it will have to explain how it arrives at this conclusion," he said.

In 2003, Interpol had 181 affiliated national police services. Of these, only 21 submitted reports on the incidence of crime in their countries.

"It would be most instructive to know how Interpol arrives at 'world' figures, enabling it to arrive at the conclusion about our country it is reported to have reached.

However, a demographic and health survey for South Africa carried out by an organisation called Macro International, funded by the United States government through USAid, showed rural African women in South Africa reported a lower rate of rape than women in the US.

"The reference to our rural women is especially apposite because it is in the rural areas that we should find entrenched habits that derive from African culture, traditions and religious beliefs.

Turning to an article on the Internet about crime in South Africa, written by a South African expatriate in the US, Mbeki said what she was conveying to the rest of the world "is an outright lie".

'Dare not allow hope for future'

"The psychological residue of apartheid has produced a psychosis among some of us such that, to this day, they do not believe that our nonracial democracy will survive and succeed.

"They dare not allow themselves hope for the future, because they know that the pain of having it dashed, which they are convinced will happen, will be too great.

"Crime in our country provides them with the most dramatic evidence of that decline, the evidence that they are right to foresee a hopeless future for our country, the proof that sooner or later things will fall apart," said Mbeki.

- SAPA