Watching the Murder of an innocent man

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The mob, desperate for vengeance, had found an unlikely guide to lead them into their dark work. Fifteen-year-old Siphiwe, short, round-faced and reliably smiling, declared, "I know where these criminals live."

He was a wayward teenager, a bad boy wanting to become a worse boy, and this gave him credibility in the matter of where vicious criminals might be found. A few men lifted him onto their shoulders so that the crowd, already in the hundreds, could see him better. Then an older man, wiser about these things, said to put the boy down. More than likely, they were about to kill someone. No one in the mob ought to be too conspicuous.

Diepsloot, in the northern reaches of Johannesburg, is a settlement of 150,000 people, the majority of them destitute. Crime oversteps even poverty as the most bedeviling affliction, and the night before, a gang of thugs marauded through one of the huge squatter camps in a subdivision called Extension 1.

An unfortunate reality of our SA society.

There is a recurring theme, as brought up by Mr Vavi of Cosatu, that is, the inequalities of our society and its source, apartheid. There is a constant droning of the disparities between wealthy white and black poor mass followed by we should build a society free of racial differences. What these commentators neglect to comment on or do analysis on, is the disparities in wealthy black and or emerging middle class vs the poor mass. This stat will be equally one sided. They cannot ignore this fact in their analysis purely to highlight the affects of apartheid and they certainly cannot deny the emergence of a black middle class and wealthy class.

The other point is that the inequalities in our society have become wider under our new regime.

The problems need to be addressed but labelling it along racial lines will just get peoples backs up and most will rather then just ignore it! The issues of the poor are a structural problem. For me the solution is for government to commit to job creation. The problem we face as business is that legislation, whilst intentions are good, it is generally costly to comply with. Jobs are being lost in order to cover the costs of compliance. The regulation can also tend towards a barrier to entry. It seems illogical to aim for growth yet have so many idle hands!

It is really time for South Africans to grow up and understand policies. i.e. What is Capitalism? What is Socialism? What is Communism? What are the benefits and negatives of each and can we cross polinate these systems? By the way communism and socialism are two very different systems. South Africa cannot follow a pure capitilist system as we are aready on the back foot with its inheritted problem of the poor created by the apartheid system. We cannot follow socialism to the letter or we will become a welfare state. Communism has failed in many parts of the world, so no comment.

The problems of the poor are global phenomenon which is not race sensitive. Brazil is the second most unequal society and you would find some of these types of things, reported in this article, happening in their society too.

What could we as a country have done, with the money lost to corruption, for the poor in SA?

But, we tend to over analyse things and forget the victim was someones brother, son and perhaps even a father which is no different to the loss of life we all suffer.

Article wrong Siphiwe is 16 not 15.