Are rural criminals a bigger threat than city criminals?

We conversed with friends over the massacres that have hit the Eastern Cape lately. We spoke of them for what they are.

We dissected this loss of lives and spoke of the nothingness that life had been reduced to and the ease in which people have exchanged words with the loss of life. This is an ugly place to be in.

Now that we have come to terms as to where we are, we should be honest with ourselves, at the very least, with the remedy to this societal ill we are plagued with.

South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. There were more than 27 000 murders in 2022 – amounting to 45 people per 100 000, out of a population of almost 60 million.

We are also under a dizzying spell of a femicide and pedicide.

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South Africa, with its porous borders, high number of school dropouts, crippling unemployment and an unmatched gap between the haves and the have-nots, is a criminal’s haven.

But the fear is now that the sanctuary of the homesteads has been rocked.

Not to say that other provinces are not experiencing this challenge, but safe to say that criminality has found a hiding place in areas that the powers that be have forgotten about.

There is an expectation of high security in high-density population of cities like Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban.

We slowly, incorrectly so, start to believe that in the progress of the metropoles, the homesteads are a safe space that need reduced policing.

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That the possible perpetrators walk in the concrete jungle and the elderly parents left to tend to minor children, while their parents are in the city to fulfil their financial obligations, are safe because, who would harm mama Radebe; only for us to reel in the shock of aftermaths such as this.

Herewith the unpopular opinion, are the village assassins and criminals not a greater risk than the city slicker criminals we find on Small Street?

The gall and unwavering bravery to walk in on 18 people and take their lives speaks to a conscience that went comatose.

These hired gunmen that come from homesteads in rural South Africa speak to the depravity of people that the cosmopolitan cannot conjure up.

We may share jokes in an effort to make the situation less gruesome, but is there any truth in the fact that the poverty of rural living has created intensely vile humans who value the life of a sheep on equal standing as that of a human life, making it easier to kill?

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