The murder of a high-ranking official of the Daewoo Motor Corporation in South Africa yesterday shocked the community and challenged police assertions that after its upward surge in recent years crime is at last "stabilising".
Mr Y.K. Kwon, president of the corporation's South African branch, was found dead in his car in the driveway of the guesthouse where he lived. The apparent victim of an attempt to hijack his vehicle, he had been shot in the head. His mobile phone and wallet had not been taken, leading to conjecture that the hijack attempt had been interrupted or bungled.
In a statement likely to cause consternation in governing circles, the South Korean Embassy warned yesterday that the murder could slow down investment in South Africa. "Crime is a deterrent to foreign investment," Mr Chong Kim, of the embassy, said.
The slaying of Mr Kwon recalled the murder in August 1996 of a German businessman, Mr Erich Ellmer, of the mammoth AEG Group, and the anxiety that it stirred in the small but financially influential German community in South Africa.
Crime as a major, if not the major, problem facing South Africa is apparent in the election posters which have begun to festoon lamp-posts. The ANC-led government faces increasingly shrill accusations that it is soft on crime, that it is more concerned about the human rights of criminals than about the safety of law-abiding citizens.
These accusations often focus on President Nelson Mandela's steadfast refusal to heed growing demands, from blacks as well as whites, for the restoration of the death penalty, declared to be contrary to the bill of rights by the Constitutional Court in 1995.
Since the advent to power of the ANC in 1994, there has been a marked reduction in politically motivated violence, the recent assassination in KwaZulu-Natal of the United Democratic Movement leader, Sifiso Nkabinde, and pipe-bomb explosions in Cape Town, notwithstanding.
But the same cannot be said of criminal violence: figures collated from police statistics by the Institute of Race Relations show a sharp rise in most crime from the last year of National Party rule in 1993 to the third year of ANC government in 1997. Thus, to quote one key figure, the annual number of murders rose from 19,600 in 1993 to 24,600 in 1997.
But, according to police statisticians, the rate of some major crimes is now "stabilising" and even declining, markedly in the case of murder. But the optimism generated by police figures is tempered by several factors.
One, as Ms Antoinette Louw, of the Institute of Security Studies, notes, is awareness that crime is "stabilising" at a high level. Another is the reality that the rate is still rising for some crimes, dramatically so in the case of rape. A third factor is growing wariness of police figures, in part because the optimism which underpins them is not consistent with the on-the-ground experience of many.
As John Hunt and Reg Lascaris, who run one of South Africa's most successful advertising agencies, note in their book, The South African Dream: "Official credibility is hampered by the fact that many statistics are open to challenge or simply flawed."