Former president FW de Klerk’s spokesperson Dave Steward believes he and his wife were ”very lucky” to have emerged relatively unscathed from an armed robbery at their Claremont, Cape Town, home.
Steward, who is also executive director of the FW de Klerk Foundation, said on Friday that he and his wife Lanice were attacked as they prepared to reverse out of their garage to visit her elderly parents at 6.15pm on Sunday.
”Suddenly one guy yanked open my door, and his accomplice yanked open the door on my wife’s side,” he said.
”The guy on my side put a 38 revolver to my head and demanded money, jewellery, watches and so forth.”
The couple gave the robbers what they had on them, and the men — one wearing a balaclava, the other an anorak with a hood — then demanded they close the garage door.
Steward said his wife pretended that they could close it only by pressing a control button next to the kitchen door.
One of them accompanied her in that direction, and as he did so, kissed her on the cheek, fondled her lower body and pressed himself against her.
When Steward called to her that he did not think it was a good idea to close the door, the other man punched him in the eye.
Meanwhile, she was repeatedly pressing a hand-held security company alarm button she was carrying.
Unaware of the unfolding drama, the couple’s son Anthony (22) assured the security company it was a false alarm.
He found out what was going on when, alerted by the barking of the family’s two poodles, he emerged from the house to be confronted by the robbers demanding cellphones. He went back into the house to fetch one.
The man with Steward ordered him to get into the boot of the car, which Steward refused to do.
”I said no. There was no way I would do that. It would leave my wife completely exposed,” he said. The robber punched him again, this time in the mouth.
In response to the repeated alarm, the security company set out a response unit and, hearing sirens, Steward told the robbers he thought it was time for them to go.
”They had a bit of a discussion about it, and then they decided to leave,” he said.
They took with them two cellphones, two watches and his wallet with credit cards.
Steward said the security company arrived minutes later, followed soon afterwards by the police, who were ”very professional and very courteous”.
The police even organised a counsellor to come and speak to them, he said.
A docket has been opened, but there has, to his knowledge, not been any arrests as yet.
”We were very lucky. The horrible reality is, this is what the vast majority of our population have to live with on a daily basis,” he said.
He and his wife were now being much more vigilant and security conscious, and were getting together with other members of their community to do ”whatever we have to” to protect themselves.
He said there had been a ”large number” of attacks in the suburb recently, including an assault on an elderly couple a few blocks away on Thursday.
Since Sunday’s incident, he had been doing some research, and discovered that since the United States invasion of Iraq in January 2003, an estimated 41 000 to 46 000 civilians had died in that conflict.
Over the same period, 70 000 to 80 000 South Africans were murdered.
This was more than the total number of American casualties in the entire Vietnam conflict.
”A low-level war is going on. That’s what it comes down to,” Steward said. ”I don’t want to blame the police or the government. This is something we all have to fight against.” — Sapa