I OFTEN wonder what savagery beats in the South African heart. Why would anybody enter a house, gang-rape a defenceless maid and kill a little girl, as happened in Lenasia, south of Johannesburg, last week? What sort of person (or better, a beast), thinks it is funny to burn the photograph of a woman who has dared to accuse a man of rape, as happened outside the Zuma trial last week?

Whatever the police or the politicians may tell us, this is a violent and threatening place. Living here is dangerous. I often find myself at work wondering about my family and when I do, it isn’t whether they are having fun and growing as people. It’s always about whether they are safe. I am sure I am not alone.

The police are very often useless. My friend Justice Malala and his wife Justine were in bed in their home in “peaceful” Parkview in Johannesburg not long ago when a man appeared at the window and started shooting at them.

The Parkview police station, once regarded as one of the best in the country, is a mere 300m from their home yet it took the police more than an hour to arrive at the house and, when they did, they were almost incapable of taking down a statement.

That was Parkview. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure just how frightening it must be to live in the poorer areas of our big cities.

I know, let’s blame apartheid. But once that’s out of the way, the question about what is to be done remains. It is never answered.

The death penalty, we are told by the experts, would make no difference. But how do we know? Why not introduce it for a three-year trial? From a specific date, you kill someone, you die. Then compare murder rates with the previous three years.

I know, I know. Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula once asked me, when I raised the death penalty with him, whether I really would want to give the state the right to kill. I said no then.

The worst part of the death penalty being reintroduced, from government’s point of view, would possibly be the number of black men they would have to kill. But I wonder how many lives they would save, black or white.

President Thabo Mbeki must wonder about it all himself. Crime kills so many hopes and destroys so many families here. It smothers the human spirit that is so vital to the development of a truly great and adventurous country.

Mbeki knows all of this and, to an extent, I admire the way he keeps focused on what he believes is the only way to deal with our malaise — the eradication of poverty.

It has to be true that a more prosperous country would be a safer one. But if the answer is economic, how long will it take? The poverty is so deep and the policies to deal with it are so conventional.

We fiddle with the colour of our economy but not the essence of it. When it was white it didn’t create enough wealth and neither will the black version.

This is cache, read story here