I’ve always been puzzled by Americans saying that one place is so many hours away from another, instead of mentioning the distance.
On that reckoning, and today’s experience, Pretoria is 4 hours away from Johannesburg. I left Yeoville at 3:30 pm after teaching a class, and had arranged to fetch my wife from work at 4:30. But she had to wait more than 2 hours outside a dark and deserted office building before I could fetch her.
We were told on the radio that this was a police “crime prevention exercise”. Have they gone loony?
They did a similar thing just before Easter, when they know more than a million members of the Zion Christian Church are making their annual pilgrimage to Moria, and so doubled their journey time, making a tiring weekend even more tiring.
But this time it was affecting people going home from work after a busy working week. I suspect that the cost of to the country of this exercise far exceeds that of any crimes they may have prevented — appointments missed, meetings cancelled and a million other things.
Road-blocks are a characteristic of third-world policing, and this exercise, which seems to have been calculated to cause the maximum inconvenience to the maximum number of law-abiding people, and shows that after 13 years of freedom the government has failed to transform the police force (today’s exercise shows that it’s still a force, not a “service”) into an effective crime-fighting body.
If that’s the way the police force celebrates 13 years of freedom, they show that talk of transformation is meaningless. This was far, far worse than any of the “security forces” roadblocks in the 1980s.
Perhaps they can show I’m wrong, if they can say how many murderers and rapists they arrested and charged this afternoon, how many stolen cars they recovered, how many unlicensed firearms they confiscated (and charged those in whose possession they were found).
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