Treading on Thin Ice
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2018
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kate Adie presents a programme reflecting on two men's political careers which effectively ended this week. Andrew Harding in Johannesburg reflects on the demise of Jacob Zuma who finally bowed to months of pressure and quit as president of South Africa; while Jenny Hill, reporting from Cologne, considers what the resignation of Martin Schulz, as leader of the Social Democrats (SPD), says about the current state of German politics. The death of a Cold War-era contact prompts Nick Thorpe in Budapest to consider how attitudes to the media more than thirty years ago seem eerily to be returning. Meanwhile Katty Kay has to persuade a nervous Moscow-born taxi driver that it really is safe to drive her to Compton, the city once synonymous with gang violence and murder and made famous - or notorious - by NWA's album, "Straight Outta Compton". Finally, Justin Rowlatt intrepidly ventures into India's icy Ladakh region to accompany a team bringing electricity to remote rural villages - and gets his feet frozen to the ice for his trouble.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.6 | Good morning. Today we take a walk on the wild side in Los Angeles |
| 0:08.0 | and find it's not so wild anymore. |
| 0:11.0 | It may have been carnival in Germany this week, but there's not been much fun for German |
| 0:15.6 | politicians trying to put together a new government. Old habits die hard as our correspondent |
| 0:21.8 | finds in Hungary as he looks back on communist efforts to silence |
| 0:25.8 | awkward writers. |
| 0:27.5 | And we take a perilous hike in the Himalayas as solar park comes to the mountains. We begin in South Africa which like Zimbabwe recently has a new president |
| 0:38.4 | and got rid of the old one without a shot fired or a single soldier deployed. The new man, Cyril Ramaposa, promised |
| 0:46.0 | he would follow in the footsteps of Nelson Mandela and do all he could to improve the |
| 0:50.8 | country's economy after years of corruption and influence peddling. |
| 0:55.8 | So how did his predecessor get away with it for so long? |
| 0:59.7 | Andrew Harding in Johannesburg has a few ideas. |
| 1:03.0 | I think the first time I saw Jacob Zuma in the Flesh was on a cold night back in 2009. |
| 1:08.6 | I'd only recently moved to Johannesburg and as I parked my car on a dark side street near the ANC's headquarters in the city centre, |
| 1:16.2 | I wasn't quite sure how worried I should be about getting mugged. |
| 1:19.9 | I got out, followed the roar of music, turned a corner and saw a man in a leather jacket on a floodlit |
| 1:25.8 | stage wielding a microphone like a rock star and belting out a song about machine guns. |
| 1:31.9 | Earlier that evening, Jacob Zuma had just become president of South Africa, |
| 1:36.2 | and here he was enjoying himself. Even then, everyone knew Zuma was, well, colourful, compromised. He'd just been acquitted of raping the daughter of an old friend of his, |
| 1:47.0 | and he'd narrowly escaped going on trial for corruption, |
| 1:50.1 | despite the fact that his financial advisor had been convicted of soliciting bribes |
... |
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