Cape Talk, Wednesday morning

And trusted only on Cape Talk. Okay, so we are going to go to Professor Lisa Thompson right now. We're going to talk about South Africa's political assassination crisis. Prof, welcome. It's great to have you with us. Good morning. Lovely to be here. Have you voted already, Prof? I have to say I have not. I am in Somerset West, where which is

You know, I'm not telling anyone anything new, but a DA stronghold. And the queues down at Bisweni at the moment are an hour and a half long or have been. Lots of people decided to get up early and queue from six o'clock. So I'm glad that that thought did cross my mind. But I thought I'd wait and see. And fortunately, now they say the queues are decreasing. It's not quite as bad. So as soon as we are done talking, I'll hoof it off down there and make a big deal.

Of the fact that I'm over 60. Hopefully, I'll be in and out quickly. Absolutely, absolutely, Prof. We're calling it a crisis. We're hearing a lot about it. It's coming closer. I did mention an assassination in Knysna that we spoke about on this particular show. Historically, it was in KZN. Now we're seeing it happen in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga. Is the word befitting the extent?

To which these assassinations are happening. I'm talking about the word crisis. Yes, I think the big issue that South Africans are facing now with coming to terms with the number of assassinations is that political and criminal agendas have merged. We've seen in this rapid uptick of murders leading up to this local election that we've had organized criminal activities.

Related to political assassination. So these crimes are carefully planned and orchestrated, and those who are perpetrating them are hired hitmen. So the actual perpetrators are very well protected by this form of merging of political and criminal activity. And I think that's the very concerning factor because we know we've just had the midterm budget review, we know that we're still under economic austerity control.

Conditions for some time, and we have been ever since we've had COVID and all the load shedding issues. So things are not getting easier at local level for those who are on the downside of the economic scale when it comes to resources. And that is why I think also there's been such an uptick in the assassinations, because it's the battle for scarce resources that are only becoming scarcer. Let us understand the motive.