Cele can state the obvious, but can he stop crime?

So the Great Sleuth, police minister Bheki Cele, said a year ago after a German tourist was gunned down on the notoriously crime-ridden road to the Kruger National Park’s Numbi gate, that “it does look like we have a problem here”.

To which the first retort that springs to the lips is a tired but apposite “No shit, Sherlock”.

Cele’s comments are now trending in internet searches after US TB expert David Russell was beaten and robbed at gunpoint on his way to Cape Town International Airport when his navigation app took him on a short cut through Philippi.

Driving to Philippi alone in your rental car would be not unlike taking a stroll through the housing projects of the Bronx or Department 93 in Paris. Unless, of course, you’ve done a bit of reading about these places and you want to go there, for whatever crazy reason.

Russell says he doubts he will return to South Africa, and he will no doubt tell his friends that this beautiful but dangerous country should be avoided at all costs.

And so the harm that such incidents do to the country’s tourism spreads like Covid in a hot airtight bar full of screaming drunks.

Saying that the police should be highly visible on the Numbi gate road and at other tourist-jackrolling hotspots is a bit like saying there are elephants in Kruger. We know this and yet it still isn’t being done, even though it would be a relatively easy Band-Aid to stick over the festering sore of South Africa’s crime.

Google and the tourism department are now exploring waze, I mean ways, of directing travellers using navigation apps away from dangerous places, because for all of its much-praised benefits, AI is failing to keep humans safe.

Then again, not relying on a phone to tell you how to tie your shoelaces would be the first step to a better life for us all.