Acts of public violence and looting that threaten the country’s economic prospects are sabotage and not just a spontaneous response to former president Jacob Zuma’s imprisonment, the government has said.
What began as sporadic instances of violence on July 7 as a response to Zuma being jailed for defying a court order rapidly spread to Gauteng from KwaZulu-Natal, threatening food and medicine supply chains. It also stalled the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, which is seen as the only hope to prevent future deadly waves of the disease and enable economic activity to go back to normal.
“It was all [a] smokescreen,” police minister Bheki Cele said after assessing damage to property in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
Separately, he told Business Day that investigations and prosecutions of suspects connected to the mayhem, which by Wednesday had left more than 70 dead and disrupted the N3 highway, a key route for transporting everything from cars to medicine, would reveal whether anyone should be charged with treason.
Unlike “normal” acts of looting — where people target shops with consumer goods, food and electronic appliances — gangs have also targeted infrastructure such as the Durban harbour. They also went for warehouses and sugar mills.
Transnet declared force majeure on the 688km Natal Corridor (Natcor) line, which links Durban and Gauteng. “Force majeure” refers to an unforeseeable event that prevents someone from fulfilling their contractual obligations.
While Cele was reluctant to expand any further and made no comments about whether people linked to Zuma were directly involved in planning the violence, he gave the first clear indication of the security agencies’ thinking about the source of the violence.
Bloomberg reported that Cele sidestepped questions about whether Zuma’s daughter Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla was being investigated, saying only that as many as 12 people were on authorities’ radar for stoking the riots. It reported Mzwanele Manyi, a spokesperson for the Jacob Zuma Foundation, as saying that there is no link between the violence and tweets by Zuma-Sambudla.
Business organisations, including the body representing most of the country’s commercial property owners, believe the violence was planned and orchestrated, while analysts said the perpetrators are also likely to be involved in ANC factional battles and sought to undermine President Cyril Ramaphosa’s hold on power.
Police and intelligence services have come under intense criticism for failing to anticipate and prevent the events of this week, which have dealt a hammer blow to the country’s economy and international image.
Cele this week said police had foiled plans to burn hospitals filled with patients and torch the KwaZulu-Natal legislature.
“The aim, it seems, is to destabilise the economy and catalyse a chain reaction that ultimately shifts broad sentiment and destabilises the Ramaphosa-led faction of the ANC”, said Menzi Ndhlovu, senior analyst at advisory firm Signal Risk.
Durban Chamber CEO Palesa Phili said that while businesses are assessing the cost of the devastation, the key focus now is averting a goods crisis.
The Road Freight Association (RFA) estimates that at least 40 trucks across KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and Mpumalanga have been destroyed since the violence erupted on July 7. It estimated the cost at R250m-R300m.
RFA CEO Gavin Kelly said the destruction of trucks would cost billions of rand in the long term as business confidence drops and SA loses its status as a regional transit hub. Investors will “turn away from us and move to other countries that are safer and more efficient”.
SA Property Owners Association (Sapoa) CEO Neil Gopa said the police had been caught off guard and overwhelmed. “So far police and the army have not managed the situation well at all. They have been overwhelmed.”
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