Business Traveller

Since recently finding out that I’m going to be a father, I’ve given allot of thought to where I’d like the kid to grow up. There are many aspects of growing up in England that I wouldn’t want for my children, and I’ve been hit by bouts of homesickness, so I’m seriously considering going back to South Africa.

First problem is unemployment. Unfortunately there are no official figures that I have been able find for unemployment, but the estimates range between a conservative 35% and a pessimistic 65% of working age adults are unemployed in South Africa. This is something that I will need to investigate further.

When I left South Africa, crime didn’t feature in any of my reasons. Yes, the worsening crime situation was something that bothered me, but not enough to make we want to leave. Since I’ve been abroad for the last 6 years, though, I have to admit that the crime situation in South Africa is something that I am concerned about when returning to the UK. Actually, more than crime is the Safety aspect of returning, and raising a family there.

From the research that I have been doing, safety is becoming even more of a concern. Ignoring crime for the moment, just driving in South Africa is a lethal activity. Research released earlier this year places South Africa firmly in the top spot for the most dangerous places to use the roads. The figures show that, on an annual basis, 56 of every 100,000 South Africans will be killed on the roads in South Africa. Compare this to the UK’s 3, and you see that you are nearly20 times more likely to die in a car accident in South Africa (http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20060710010928112C842021). That’s very scary. Admittedly about half of the road deaths in South Africa are attributed to Jaywalking, but this still leaves 28 in 100,000 deaths per year. This is still almost double that of the country that comes second – India, on 15…

Now onto crime. I know that crime is everywhere, and that you could be robbed, assaulted or murdered anywhere you go in the world. The thing is that you need to take a look at how likely it is. In South Africa, there were 18,793 people murdered last year(http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?newslett=1&click_id=79&art_id=vn20060928065824841C157016&set_id=1). In the UK that figure was only 765, and that includes the poor people that were killed in the London train bombings! Now consider that the UK population is nearly double that of South Africa, and you get the fact that you are almost 50 times more likely to be murdered in South Africa than you are in the UK.

Many people in South Africa would disagree with me for saying this, but as much as I love my country, and as much as I miss the life I had there, I’m just not sure that I’d want to raise a family in an environment that is that dangerous. I saw a movie once (I think it was Dante’s Peak), where one of the scientists says ‘If you drop a frog into boiling water, it’ll jump straight out, but if you heat the water slowly, it’ll sit there and boil to death’. I think that before I left South Africa, I was noticing that crime was getting worse, and getting closer. Some of my family that lived on farms were murdered in horrific attacks, so it was starting to directly affect people I knew and loved, but somehow it wasn’t enough to drive me away. Coming back to the boiling cauldron, though, is something that might not be so comfortable…