Finding Sipho
The economy is in such a state that crime is reaching epic proportions never seen before.
Sounds like a game of sorts that you would play except this happened for real last night and brings home the reality of the crime impacted economy of South Africa. Sipho is one of the drivers who works for the family business and he failed to return home after a day doing errands. He had 4 calls on his schedule and should have been back at the latest by 4pm.
The company had done away with the vehicle trackers years ago and the drivers phone went to voice mail. We had a search party out looking for him by 9pm last night trying to retrace his steps and eventually had a stroke of luck finding him at one of the police stations in the area. This was around 2 am in the morning and he was lucky as not everyone is so lenient with their victims.
Sipho had been hijacked and had a bag thrown over his head and his wrists bound. The hijackers drove him to a remote area in the bush and dropped him off which took him over 10 hours to make his way back. The vehicle is long gone as within a few hours it will be unrecognizable, but this is what we are all dealing with on a daily basis. Hijackings and kidnappings have become a more common occurrence within the last year. One of the reasons I would never buy the car of my dreams even if I could afford it as you are putting everyone at risk.
Business is hard enough without having to worry about all the other things that are going on around you. The industrial area where the business is situated averages around 4 working hours per day that is being lost to power interruptions, then you are worried about theft and now hijackings. This is not a fair playing field and why everyone around the world is fortunate that they don't have these types of worries.
I don't care what the stats tell you, but crime is on the increase in a major way as the unemployed have no alternative to feed their families. Sipho was understandably shook up and is taking some time off but he did mention that the hijackers were foreigners from Zimbabwe. The open borders with millions running around with no documentation is very worrying as they don't exist, but they do. The country is in a mess and I see no way back as there is no law and order and no one seems to care.
When I was involved in the bicycle assembly business I at one stage employed over 200 people with the majority being foreigners. The only reason was they worked harder and didn't scheme on how to not work like the locals did. The one big problem however is the foreigners had sticky fingers and were always looking to steal. In the end I fired them all except 3 over the next 2 years as they were all caught stealing. Of the 3 I kept I ended up with only 1 as the other 2 were also caught stealing. This is one person out of more than 160 people who is still employed as he valued his job more than the stealing going on around him.
This was the reason why my current business has a handful of people and I work on my own with no staff. Having staff is a nightmare and more often than not I have to do the job myself anyway so I see no point. A sad state of affairs as these crime numbers are only on the increase.
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This is terrible, a real nightmare.
I totally agree with you. When people will not be able to feed their children, even if they work day and night, they will not be able to earn enough money to raise their children well, then the same thing happens, they start stealing. Since the rate of inflation has increased here in Pakistan too, the thefts have increased a lot. Those who are sitting in the government have no tension about anything and the people are crying.
That is awful - I am very glad that Sipho is okay. I don't think I would be okay with living in Gauteng at all. There is a lot of crime in Cape Town too, but a significant amount of the violent crime is kept to the Cape Flats where the gangs are located. With that said, I did recently post about how I lost my original boss (and friend), for the Company I work for now, to a botched hijacking/murder back in 2019.
The police in South Africa are under-funded, under-trained, often lacking in ammunition and sometime even corrupt and working together with criminals (rural stock-theft and selling/renting firearms to gangsters), so it will feel more and more like we have to look after ourselves and our own safety.
Things will get more worse than today, Inflation is getting high and It's getting very hard for a middle class man to feed his family. Incidents like robbery , theft is increasing day by day, and young boys have nothing to do. No jobs, no way of earning.