Mbeki speaks out against crime
2007-02-23 16:29
Cape Town - South African society faces the spectre of moral decay arising from the frequency of crimes such as rape and ritual killings, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday.
In a speech to tribal elders in the parliamentary capital Cape Town, Mbeki called on them to help restore the "moral fibre" of the country which has one of the highest crime rates in the world.
"As we meet here today, we are confronted by the disturbing spectre of moral decay in our society," said Mbeki.
"This includes the prevalence of such abominable acts as the rape of women, including children and the elderly, ritual killings, stealing of pension money from the elderly, the disabled and children, and what (veteran Zulu leader Mangosutu) Buthelezi has correctly lamented as the lack of respect that has crept into our society."
Mbeki has previously been accused of a failure to empathise with concerns about the crime rate in a country where around 50 people are murdered every day and half a million burglaries or robberies were reported last year.
Some 50 000 rapes, including around 20 000 of children, are reported to police every year, but women's group say the real figure is around 1.5 million.
A 'change of tone'
However in a sharp change of tone earlier this month, Mbeki acknowledged during his annual state of the nation address to parliament that communities had been left cowering in fear as a result of crime.
Mbeki told the National House of Traditional Leaders on Friday that they needed to help counter racial stereotypes, evoking the traditional Zulu concept of humanity and solidarity known as Ubuntu.
"I believe that these challenges are sufficiently acute to inspire and energise our traditional leaders vigorously to defend and promote the basic values of Ubuntu and thus ... defeat all that seeks to define and confirm the stereotyping of our people as barbaric and savage, which they are not."
The crime crisis has prompted increasing introspection among senior figures who battled against the whites-only apartheid regime which collapsed in 1994.
In a recent interview, the Nobel prize-winning former archbishop Desmond Tutu said the rate of violent crime showed "something has happened to us" since the initial euphoria of the post-apartheid era.