Hijack!

It was a Sunday night and I had just got back from a weekend at a private game reserve near the Kruger with my girlfriend. We'd had a great weekend and I even witnessed my first kill - a lioness taking a wildebeest on her own, at night.

I was driving to the office for a late-night work session - changes on vlive are sometimes done at night. Driving along Shakespeare road, the lights of an oncoming car suddenly moved into my lane. I slowed down and stopped, thinking WTF?!? I had no inkling there was anything amiss at this point. The car came to a stop right in front of me. Next thing I know a guy leaps out of the passenger door and points a gun right at me. Oh SHIT! First thing I did was put the car in reverse - and stalled. Good one. So next I thought let me just get my stuff out of the boot, they can take the car. So I got out and went round to the back but the guys caught me up and I soon had a gun barrel pressing against me. Next thing I know I was face down on the ground. I tossed my cellphone into the darkness, hoping they wouldn't hang around to look for it, and I could retrieve it after they had gone. A car had approached and stopped while I was on the ground, but when they saw what was going on, they stuck the car in reverse and disappeared. 10 seconds later I was on my own. I had no cellphone, no money, and no way of contacting anyone. I didn't know any of my friends' phone numbers. I began to run towards home (it's a 5 minute walk), trying to flag down passing cars. Several went past without stopping. Eventually one turned around and stopped to ask if I was ok. They took me to my girlfriend's house, where she was sleeping on the sofa. 30 minutes of banging on the window and shouting later, I succeeded in rousing her, and luckily she had a spare car and a set of keys for my place.

The stuff I lost included:
Apple Macbook
iPhone
2 passports
Nikon D90 plus all my lenses
a £6000 Nikon lens I'd hired for the weekend
All the photos from the lion kill
1 rental car

luckily I wasn't touched - until I noticed a bruise on my back. Perfectly round - from the gun barrel where I must have been whacked to the ground. And thinking back, it's probably lucky I didn't reverse away because they probably would have shot at me, and might have hit me.

Election 2009

Today South Africans go to the polls to decide, among other things, who will be their next President (although the office of President is not actually directly elected).

The ANC are widely expected to win, which would make Jacob Zuma the next President. Now to illustrate the problem, I'm going to use a couple of statistics which I found here. 51% of ANC supporters believe he is innocent of the corruption charges (which were recently dropped for dubious reasons), while 71% support him unconditionally. So that means that there are plenty of ANC supporters who believe he is guilty of corruption, but still support him unconditionally. That is the problem.

Apart from the corruption, there's the fact that he doesn't have any education beyond age 12, thinks that a shower will protect you from HIV ... the list goes on.

But if so many of his own supporters believe he's guilty of corruption and still stand behind him we have a problem. Combine that with the propensity of black people to vote ANC for historical / emotional reasons rather than based on any rational thinking, and they will be in power for many years to come.

The best thing that can happen to this country is a viable black party (like COPE) to take a large chunk of the votes. Democracy will only be mature when the ANC are in opposition and have to win the voters through policy and political debate.