Editorial comment

What a strange country we live inThe recent arrest of a nurse and a medical doctor for drug trafficking in two separate incidents at two different hospitals around the country is a serious indictment of our medical facilities and medical employees.

Of course, it is a well-known secret in the townships that the bulk of incidents of crime reported to the police in most townships involve not only criminals that get arrested for them, but also the highly placed white-collar government employees who work at government facilities and have easy access to drugs.

The easy availability of drugs that are only obtainable at medical facilities such as local clinics and hospitals for a variety of medical conditions, including HIV/Aids are in fact stolen by highly placed medical employees who in turn collude with crime syndicates to peddle these drugs for a fee.

This does not only place the lives of people living with the HIV/Aids medical condition and those who abuse the drugs as well as the lives of the general public in danger, but actually makes a mockery of the government’s efforts to fight drugs and the spread of the HIV/Aids disease.

So rife is the abuse of drugs such as nyaope in our townships that some parents have now resorted to actually providing their teenagers with money to purchase the drug and use it at home rather than to risk being arrested by the police, or worse still, killed by the community for stealing and breaking into homes.

A young man who has just been released from “Sun City” after spending five months awaiting trial for house-breaking to feed his nyaope addiction, described the abuse of the drug among awaiting-trial and sentenced prisoners as “staggering”. The question is; who is supplying the drugs and the supplementary medical concoctions such as RAVs to the incarcerated users behind the prison walls?

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Cast your vote with your eyes wide open

As we head for yet another round of local government elections next week, it is up to every South African who will be casting their votes next Wednesday, August 3, to ensure that they do so for the sole purpose of advancing our democracy. This is the only democratic process through which citizens of all democratic countries practise their democratic right to select honourable fellow citizens to represent them in their local municipality wards.

It is for this reason that all peace-loving South Africans are urged to go to their respective polling stations in large numbers to make sure that they exercise their democratic right and aspiration to elect upright men and women to be their ward representatives.

Ours is a young and vibrant democracy that can grow and prosper only if we, the citizens, ensure that we fully participate in all its democratic processes to move the country to the next level. We’ve come a long way from the dark days of our past and as we still battle to find our way through our journey to Uhuru, let us make sure that we all play our part by casting our votes for a better local government in our areas next Wednesday.

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Finally, the cops are doing something about it

Well, the good news is that a new team of policemen and -women have been tasked to deal with the growing trend of teenage prostitution in our cities and suburbs around the country. Hundreds of South Africans, among them parents, families and relatives of teenage see girls abducted from their homes to be peddled as prostitutes by drug gangs in the back streets of our towns and cities.

It brought a sigh of relief to see this team of enthusiastic policemen and -women scale walls and break down doors of illicit sex dens in several major cities around the country to rescue young girls, some barely 16, from the clutches of drug and prostitution foreign syndicates that operate their dirty human trafficking operations on our doorsteps with impunity.