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SA still has lots to fix - FW
26/04/2007 00:03 - (SA)
Doha - South Africa has achieved much since the end of apartheid, but still has serious problems to overcome, said former president FW de Klerk on Wednesday as the country prepared to celebrate the anniversary of its first democratic elections.
"If I were to draw a balance sheet, then the positive (developments) by far outweigh the negative," De Klerk said on the sidelines of an international conference on democracy and development in the Qatari capital, Doha.
Freedom Day on April 27 marks the 13th anniversary of the 1994 all-race vote which brought Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to power.
De Klerk was upbeat in his review of how South Africa had fared since the historic poll.
Grave issues still to be sorted out
"We are back in the international community, our economy is growing at an impressive rate of about 6% in real terms and there is a great deal of goodwill about," he said.
But the former president, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 with Mandela for their roles in negotiating an end to apartheid, warned that some grave issues still needed to be tackled.
These included an "unacceptably high" crime rate, the spread of HIV/Aids and the fact that 50% of the population was living on or below the poverty line.
About 5.5 million people are living with HIV in South Africa, a country in which about 50 people are murdered every day and half a million burglaries or robberies were reported last year.
More money for police
About 50 000 rapes, among them about 20 000 children, are reported to police every year, but women's groups say the real figure is about 1.5 million.
De Klerk said these issues were being addressed through better funding for the police, improved action plans for the treatment and prevention of HIV/Aids and job creation.
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