President Thabo Mbeki on Friday tried to address the negativity expressed by South Africans about South Africa. Writing in his weekly online letter Mbeki said South Africa’s democracy was less than ten years old and confronted by serious poverty that would take a great deal of time and effort to eradicate.
”This is one of negatives used to justify a feeling of hopelessness about our future,” he wrote.
Mbeki said as the elections loom South Africa’s national statistics would become one of the ”hottest” issues that would be contested.
Speaking about a book called South Africa: The Good News, Mbeki said the majority of South Africans knew very little about the problems afflicting countries like the UK and the United States.
”In good measure, this seeming insulation from awareness of these problems arises from the fact that their citizens draw no pleasure in broadcasting them.”
He said the citizens of these countries did not need to read books to urge them to tell the good news about their countries.
South Africans had to consider that countries like the US and the UK had had much longer periods of democracy … ”therefore, the possibility for their governments and peoples to have solved their social and economic problems much earlier than we ever could”.
However, each of those countries had their share of crime and poverty.
”The point however, is that despite this reality, their citizens do not go about thrashing their countries.”
He said South Africans made the mistake of thinking that this country was the only one facing problems of poverty and crime. – Sapa