Crime caught up with Carte Blanche as the crew of M-Net's (DStv 101) weekly investigative and current affairs show got held up and robbed at gunpoint - ironically while filming an insert at a "dead" corner where there are no cameras installed for a story about the proliferation of Vumatel's Vumacam surveillance cameras in Johannesburg.
A new surveillance camera system, Vumacam from Vumatel, is being rolled out in the Johannesburg central business district (CBD) and surrounding suburbs as a R500 million high-tech solution to South Africa's rising crime rates, but some people are objecting over privacy concerns.
The radio presenter Masa Kekana joined Carte Blanche to do her first insert as a guest presenter produced by Sophia Phirippides, but then endured a baptism of fire when Masa Kekana and the crew suddenly became a crime statistic after they were held up and robbed at gunpoint with no visual footage to show for it.
Masa Kekana interviewed spokesperson Murray Hunter of the civil rights organisation Right2Know (R2K) on a suburb streetcorner in Johannesburg with cameraman Thabo Maleswene, with the organisation that has serious misgiving about how the Vumacam surveillance system and cameras are being rolled out.
A Vumacam street pole was already erected on the street corner, but no cameras have been installed yet.
"Minutes later," said Masa Kekana, "our whole crew was robbed at gunpoint. All our equipment was stolen but thankfully no-one was harmed". The robbers - two men - were loitering nearby and scouting out the area and the Carte Blanche team until they decided to make their armed attack on the TV crew.
After the robbery and recovering from their harrowing ordeal, Carte Blanche returned to the same street corner to finish the R2k interview for the insert, but with security guards in a bakkie of the ADT security company parked nearby.
Sunday's episode of Carte Blanche with the Vumacam story is now available on DStv Now's Catch Up service.
