IN A moving piece in Sowetan's former sister paper, The Star, journalist Hamilton Wende calls on Johannesburg residents to clearly display their street numbers on their garden walls or gates to make it easier for the Super Cowboy's in blue to locate their houses in cases of an emergency.

Wende speaks from experience.

He says: "I have travelled around the streets of Joburg with police while they have been on patrol, and I've witnessed their frustrations on the job."

Wende says he has found that many South African Police Service's patrol cars in Johannesburg do not have map books, and that those that do - have pages missing. As a result police officers on patrol duty are often forced to ask for directions from "the few passers-by who are on the darkened streets".

"Often I have been with the police as they cruise up and down a street where someone is being raped or robbed and they cannot find the address. They are reduced to shining their headlights on blank gates or garden walls as they desperately search for the house they have been called to protect and cannot find."

This is a genuine concern that must be addressed as a matter of priority, Guluva wholeheartedly agrees.

But, seriously, and Guluva is not trying to brag or be clever or anything like that here, haven't Wende and his men and women in blue friends not yet heard, in this day and age nogal, of something called Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) navigation system?

Guluva can assure them, without fear of contradiction, that there won't be anymore "shining of headlights on blank gates or garden walls" if the SAPS were to migrate from the ancient map book environment to this technology.

He suggests that Wende give Police Commissioner General Bheki "Super Cowboy" Cele a call and propose that he invests in this simple, readily available, efficient and cost-effective technology.

That's not too much to ask, or is it, General?

A shack in San Francisco

Speaking of frustrations. On Tuesday night the Saudi cable TV network Al Jazeera flighted an interesting programme that took a critical look at Mzansi's widening gap between the rich and poor, likening the glaring disparities to apartheid inequalities.

The programme, anchored by Riz Khan in Washington, also featured a documentary co-directed by New York-based Dara Kell and titled Dear Mandela. The documentary highlights Mzansi's deepening housing crisis - or should it be human settlement crisis? - and people's frustrations at the government's inability or a lack of political will to meet its constitutional obligations.

In the documentary shack dwellers speak about broken dreams and the brutality of evictions, saying the freedom they have fought so hard for has not brought about a better life for them, but a new apartheid system.

Khan also interviewed S'bu Zikhode - president of the Abahlali base Mjondolo, said to be one of Mzansi's biggest shack dwellers' movements - via a satellite link from San Francisco in the United States.

Dressed elegantly in a pin-striped suit and white shirt, Zikhode told how millions of black South Africans had been let down by the post-apartheid government.

Interestingly, the programme did not explain why Zikode was speaking on behalf of Mzansi's shack dwellers from San Francisco. Neither did it show the viewers the shack he was living in while in that city.

• This is a column written by Bathathe Guluva

E-mail Guluva on: thatha.guluva@gmail.com.