Factional battles in the ANC have become a serious source of instability in SA, an expert panel appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa to probe the looting and violence that racked KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng in July has concluded.
SA’s law enforcement agencies were criticised in the report for their lack of preparedness.
The ANC is racked by internal battles between supporters of former president Jacob Zuma and supporters of Ramaphosa. It was the imprisonment of Zuma that sparked the looting and violence, which is estimated to have caused R50bn in damage and killed more than 350 people. It had wider costs to the economy as business confidence plunged.
These battles have since intensified ahead of the ANC’s conference in December 2022, according to the panel, chaired by University of Pretoria associate professor Sandy Africa.
Other members were former presidential adviser Mojanku Gumbi and Rhodes University lecturer Silumko Sokupa.
Ramaphosa, who released the report on Monday, will outline the first actions the government will take in response when he delivers his state of the nation address on Thursday.
The panel was tasked with undertaking a critical review of the government’s preparedness and the shortcomings in the state’s response to the violence. It was asked to review the security services’ preparedness for the July events and to make recommendations on how to strengthen security capabilities.
The panel noted in its report that some of the groups it met highlighted that internal differences in the ANC contributed to the unrest and said that this should be tackled “as a matter of national security now”.
The panel gave an unequivocal “no” to the question of whether the response by the police and the intelligence services was “timeous, appropriate and sufficient”. But it said the executive bore some of the blame for a lapse of leadership.
“There was a significant intelligence failure to anticipate, prevent or disrupt the planned and orchestrated violence; the security services failed to put in place the necessary interventions to detect and disrupt the plans,” the report said.
The cabinet had to take overall responsibility for the events and the public office-bearers who failed in their responsibilities must be held to account, the panel said. Ramaphosa must ensure that a national security strategy is urgently developed.
The panel noted that national intelligence warned that conditions were ripe for unrest and possibly violence in 2021, yet key government ministries and departments had not planned accordingly. There were several acts of major public disorder and violence in the lead-up to Zuma’s incarceration, including firearms being discharged in public. There were increasingly emboldened calls for disruptions on social media, including a call for a national shutdown.
“It struck us as inexplicable that the security services, and in particular the intelligence services, did not know the violence would happen and take the form that it did. The intelligence services have at their disposal the most intrusive of state powers, and from what we learnt did not use such powers to the extent that they could and should have in the period leading up to the outbreak of the violence.
“There was ambivalence and hesitancy on the part of the intelligence services about whether they should gather intelligence about people with a political profile, for fear of being castigated for interfering in politics.
Dysfunction
“Dysfunctional relationships between ministers and their senior leadership teams in the departments in some cases impeded synergy in the flow of intelligence, which affected decision-making.”
The panel recommended the establishment of a national early warning capability to ensure accurate and timely intelligence. The multiplicity of intelligence co-ordinating structures must be rationalised to create a more effective, streamlined and accountable intelligence capacity, it said. Bringing stability to the State Security Agency by appointing suitable people to positions of leadership is also an urgent priority. Problems in the crime intelligence division of the SA Police Service also need to be dealt with.
The panel said it did not appear that the ministers acted in a consciously co-ordinated way; there were too many public contradictory statements and spats between them.
It said the conditions that led to the unrest have not changed, leading to fears that there might be similar eruptions in future.
“The question, many argue, is not if and whether more unrest and violence will occur, but when it will occur.”
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