The Point may be female. Then again, The Point may be male. Who knows? Gender tests have yet to be undertaken. Sure, there's the rudimentary test — do you prefix the 'he' with an 's' — but we all know how unreliable that is.

Ah yes, to truly establish gender, one must delve deeply into semantics. And it all boils down to this: the ratio of the use of the letter X to the use of the letter Y. As none of the following words — Jacob Zuma, Helen Zille, Julius Malema, Vavi Zwelinzima, Blade Nzimande, Schabir Shaik, Bheki Cele and John Hlophe — contain either letter, I, personally, am leaning towards 'hermaphrodite'.

So, from one gender-uncertain individual to another: congrats Caster Semenya on your spectacular win!

Now, on to something that is only tenuously related to gender, international sporting events and world records (although I suspect there may be some in there): crime.

A BIG BLACK MARK

It would seem that solving crime is a science as complicated as establishing gender. Yip, while you and I would use the simple pull-down-the-pants method (work with the analogy here), South Africa's rickety crime-fighting machine seems to have taken the novel approach of swapping the pair of pants for a skirt, before removing the shoes and testing for bunions.

And just in case that went way over your head, here is the explanation given by Willie (snigger snigger) Scholtz, head of the SA Criminal Justice System working group, on why over a million of the two million criminal cases reported last year will go unsolved.

"The cases seem to get lost somewhere — they fall through the cracks. We have to ensure cases are not filtered out."

Those are helluva big cracks and, considering that we're talking about the majority of cases here, I would probably not have used the word 'filtered'.

But, things are looking up. Yip, Western Cape Police Commissioner Mzwandile Petros is all about reducing the number of murders in the province: "The target that we set ourselves for this financial year is to break the 2000 mark".

For the record, that is down to 2000. Personally, I feel a lot safer now.

And so should you, because our president-of-over-100-days plans to come down hard on all those law-breaking folk.

"Criminals… actually stop the rights of some citizens to live by shooting them and killing them and the next moment the lawyers are there to take him out because the Constitution says you have a right to be out on bail. But I don't know, to me there's a contradiction… but I'm talking reality, citizens are not protected. That's a reality and I think government has a responsibility to protect citizens."

Ah… irony is a beautiful thing. Strangely, the words 'innocent until proven guilty' seem to have filtered through the cracks of our crime-fighting president's mind.

But on to that 'government protecting citizens' thing — the government may want to do something about this little situation. Golden Miles Bhudu, president of the SA Prisoners' Organisation for Human Rights, has cautioned that: "Some inmates are busy planning to escape and become violent, which will affect the society at large".

Really? You don't say.

A LITTLE WHITE LIE

It would seem that Zuma's faulty memory has served him well this week — not only has he completely forgotten about that awkward out-on-bail situation, he also seems to have forgotten the comments he made earlier this year about Afrikaners being the only group of white people in South Africa who are truly African.

"We have never looked at things in terms of race and ethnicity but, rather, in terms of people being South Africans. The fact of the matter is the ANC does not look at things from a race point of view."

Erm… well, he wouldn't be the first president to tell a little white (or black/coloured/African/Indian/other) lie. Yes, Bill, we're looking at you.

It would seem that Zuma's solidarity with the Afrikaner race was more than just an election gimmick. In fact, he has agreed to a rather peculiar request.

"Please tell somebody to translate that machine gun song, because it's tough to keep up in our Afrikaans," said businessman Dirk van den Berg to Zuma in Bloemfontein.

Yip, I'm sure that's exactly what freedom fighters had in mind when they came up with this little song — Afrikaners calling for their machine guns.

But, since we're embracing a spirit of reconciliation, praise must go out to the Zillenator for saying something nice about old JZ. Seriously, she paid him a compliment. Sure, it was followed by some stern criticism, but don't let that spoil the moment.

"On the positive side, he is affable, humble and approachable. The personal tone of the presidency is open and friendly."

Don't write Zumilla off just yet.

The Point is open to gender suggestions. Otherwise, just share your favourite quotes from the week below!

The beggar gauntlet Rebekah Kendal reckons that begging is bad for SA because it fosters a culture of dependency.

Visit our politics page Need the latest political news, features, interviews and profiles? Visit our dedicated page...

Behind closed doors Rebekah Kendal reckons that the real losers in the Percy saga are victims of domestic abuse.