ere is some good news. Honestly. I am not making this up. Crime is declining in South Africa. It’s still absurdly high, but it is coming down and, interestingly, it’s coming down across income brackets and across geographical regions.
The reason we know — I mean actually know this — is that Discovery CEO Adrian Gore recently presented some data from Discovery’s insurance business at a BizNews conference which shows this very precisely. It’s only related to Discovery clients, naturally, but it does tally with South Africa’s official crime states.
Let’s take a dive. This is the data that Gore, who is preternaturally attuned to data, put up at the conference. You can watch the full presentation here.
Gore said Discovery covered millions of people across the country in its property and casualty business, and its motor insurance business. There had been a dramatic decrease in motor theft and household contents theft.
“Whether you cut the data by kind or size of the house, small houses, large houses, expense of cars, the data is directionally the same. If you look at different provinces, the data is the same. It’s downsloping.”
Violent crime was going the other direction from 2013 to the onset of Covid-19, but since then it has decreased too.
The most recent release of crime statistics does, more or less, bear out this trend — at least in the short term. South Africans tend to see these police stats as a bit dubious partly since they have been the subject of political machinations in the past, but mainly because they are released months after the events. Here are the top line numbers in the most recent bulletin.
Interestingly, there was a decline in most crimes in the third quarter of last year. But still, you have to hold your breath a bit at the (reported) murder and rape rates: around 70 cases of murder and 140 cases of rape were reported per day. South Africa is still a crime war zone. So, you know, there are perspectives here.
But Discovery’s numbers are interesting because they go back further and show a larger decline. Gore speculated that it was possible that some of South Africa’s crime was becoming concentrated in poorer areas. The crime stats do slightly support that notion, but the picture is mixed; reports in Mitchells Plain were down and those in Sandton were up in the latest station-by-station statistics.
The numbers obviously bounce around a lot, but in general this is a positive trend. Why is it happening? Gore said he didn’t know, but it was possible that private security was becoming more effective.
Gore was generally making a case for holding the middle ground; doing that means appreciating what there is to lose.
“First and foremost, in my view, it’s about creating a realistic sense of loss aversion, understanding the potential, not writing us off, not treating us with disrespect. This is a big country of considerable potential, but being realistic about where our problems are — I believe our problems are fundamentally economic growth.”
As a representative of a financial and healthcare business, Gore is also fundamentally in an odd position, arguing both for increased private sector involvement in government partnerships, but also arguing against the destruction of private health care as proposed by the government’s National Health Insurance legislation.
Withdraw
He told the conference that it was often suggested that he should withdraw from interaction with the government, because in effect this was the same government that was proposing the destruction of the business he represented.
“We had a lot of heat from a lot of people saying, why are you doing this? You’re propping up the government.”
Gore meets this argument by pointing to research that distinguishes between “survivalist values” and “free expression values”.
“When people are concerned about things, they think the future’s at risk. They become survival-focused. They become inward-looking. They stick to clans. They become very focused on themselves. They become inflexible and they become undemocratic.
“When people are feeling secure, there’s potential. You get this free expression, the self-expression of values; people communicate, they coordinate, they express themselves and, critically, they vote.
“Letting Eskom fail or letting the grid fail would create a survivalist mindset that would not lead to a good outcome in elections. If you think it would, it wouldn’t. With a centrist approach, people feel secure and the data shows that.”
And as far as crime is concerned, at the very least there is some data supporting that philosophy. DM
This post first appeared in the Daily Maverick here. To signup for Daily Maverick's fabulous newsletters, click below.
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