THENEWSOUTHAFRICA
wonder that when the energetic Kader Asmal, the new minister of educa-
tion in the Mbeki cabinet, had studied the total educational
picture in
South Africa, he told reporters that "the educational condition of the ma-
jority of people in this country amounts to a national emergency. It will
not be an exaggeration to say that there is a crisis at each level of the sys-
tem."75
The Mandela government did not succeed in reducing the appallingly
high crime rate inherited from the apartheid
regime. Surveys indicated
that in 1998, 83 percent of the total South African population
believed
that the government had little or no control over crime; 43 percent of the
black population
and 56 percent of the white population felt unsafe. Half
of the South African population
did not believe in the official crime statis-
tics, which are derived from data provided by the notoriously unpopular
and inefficient police, if only because of widespread
underreporting.j"
Even so, the official figures are awesome.
According to these figures,
whereas the murder rate per 100,000 decreased 7.3 percent between 1994
and 1998 (largely because of the decline of political killings), the at-
tempted murder rate increased by 7.8 percent, robbery with aggravating