"We have to do something to help unemployed people so they don't have to resort to this," was the reaction of a prominent Rhodes academic who is recovering at home after being attacked and robbed by two men this week.
"We have to do something to help unemployed people so they don't have to resort to this," was the reaction of a prominent Rhodes academic who is recovering at home after being attacked and robbed by two men this week.
The police are still looking for the two men who attacked Professor Rob O' Donoghue, education lecturer and a director at the Environmental Education and Sustainability Centre, while he was on his way to work on his bicycle on Wednesday morning, making away with items estimated to be worth R50 000.
Speaking to Grocott's Mail yesterday about his ordeal, O' Donoghue said he was cycling to work on his usual route around 7.15am when two men wearing hoodies approached him as he neared a disused sports field near Graeme College, between the railway line and the Albany tennis club.
"I greeted them, hoping that would deter them, but they were clearly intent on robbing me," he said.
He pedalled as fast as he could up the 30-metre incline, but one caught him and knocked him off his bike. The men took his laptop, cellphone, books, a wallet which containing his identity book, driver's licence and all his cards, but left his bike, which is partly electrically powered.
"The sad thing is I lost all my school work," he said.
O' Donoghue said the robbery had left him with bruising and minor injuries, including a broken thumb.
He said there people in the vicinity while he was calling for help, had been too afraid to help him.
"By then they had disappeared into the bushes," he said.
O' Donoghue said he would warn other cyclists to avoid the route, accessed from Withypool Road.
He said he would have to consider other ways of getting his work between school and home, but said he would "certainly not stop cycling".
Despite his ordeal O' Donoghue's thoughts were for the perpetrators' circumstances, saying that unemployment and lack of education drove some to robbing people.
He also expressed relief that a woman cycling with her young son who arrived at the spot soon after had not been harmed. "If I hadn't come before them, it would have been them," he said.
Police spokesman Lieutenant Luvuyo Mjekula said the police were investigating a case of robbery. No arrests have been made because O' Donoghue could not identify the suspects.
