The Leonard Lopate Show

To Albie Sachs:

My fiance is South African and I returned from SA last week for my first visit. I was terribly dismayed at what my new family told me about the corruption in the ANC, reverse racism at all levels and the extreme violent crime and sexism and denial of AIDS. My new family, many of whom have met you and hold you in high regard, live in fear and despair at what has become of the original hope of 1994. While I was there, a family was brutally murdered in North Parkhurst, (a suburb of Joburg) shot execution style and nothing was taken. Everyone I spoke to - white and black - had been victims of crime, some multiple times. Where is the accountability? As a jurist you must know that without accountability for actions, there can be no justice and no progress. Please don't put a happy, rainbow face, on what to many South Africans is heartbreaking. That said, there is tremendous beauty and potential there, but without true leadership, South Africa will fail. It already is.

Like the prior commenter, I have spent some time in Johannesburg and find it an amazing and wonderful place of enormous potential, but at the same time in peril, not just because of the injustices of the past, but also because of continuing un-addressed problems and the failure of leadership to find solutions to these problems. Crime is one of these problems - living behind security systems and barbed wire fences is a way of life that is taken for granted there, and all of those defenses are not enough to safeguard people. In addition to the other challenges, these problems sometimes seem unsurmountable.

Apartheid was a terrible system that many believed would never be overcome, and yet it was. South Africa needs leadership to overcome the current challenges, but as with the country's many other skill gaps, the leadership gap puts the achievements of the generation of leaders represented by Albie Sachs at risk as much as the challenges presented by poverty, failing infrastructure, disease and or legacies of injustice. As much as those leaders are to be admired, it is disappointing that they find themselves, perhaps by a sense of loyalty to the struggle or a feeling that their time has passed, unable to talk about it.