President Cyril Ramaphosa says SA “stared into the heart of darkness” during the eight days of “violence, looting, destruction and death” in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng last year.
On Friday Ramaphosa spoke at an SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) in-person sitting investigating the unrest. The SAHRC has questioned various witnesses, including former state security minister Ayanda Dlodlo and minister of police Bheki Cele.
Ramaphosa said events which led to the death of more than 352 people, including a 12-year-old child, left him feeling betrayed and humiliated. Nine months later he has yet to receive a report detailing the extent of the damage, in terms of total deaths and their causes.
The former AU chair said, “I kept wondering how do I go to Addis Ababa and hold my head up as the head of state of SA when we’ve just been through all this?”
Ramaphosa’s testimony lays bare alarming blind spots in national intelligence gathering ahead of the deadliest week of civil unrest in 28 years of democracy. Fury over the sentencing and imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt of a Constitutional Court order had been simmering for days.
Justice Sisi Khampepe read out the top court’s judgment on June 29 2021, ordering Zuma to spend 15 months behind bars for flouting its order that he testify at the state capture inquiry.
The court gave Zuma five calendar days to turn himself in, failing which Cele and then national police commissioner Khehla Sitole would have to, within another three days, “take all steps that are necessary and permissible in law” to ensure Zuma was jailed.
After tense deliberations at Zuma’s homestead in Nkandla on the night of July 7, he travelled to Estcourt prison. Zuma first spent one month in an isolated wing of the prison, said to be in quarantine as per Covid-19 protocols for inmates.
He was later released on medical parole. However, the high court set aside then prison boss Arthur Fraser’s decision to grant Zuma the medical parole, a decision at odds with the advice of the medical parole board. That ruling, however, has been taken on review.
Ramaphosa was, by his own admission, blindsided by what followed Zuma’s incarceration. The events of July 2021 came like “a bolt from the blue” he said, in an indication of his ignorance of rising threats to civilians, businesses and infrastructure.
Several SAHRC commissioners wanted to know what intelligence reports Ramaphosa had received in the build-up to the mayhem. He said, while there were reports about possible instability, the intensity and scale of the week’s deadly events were entirely unexpected.
Limited intelligence reports only referred to narrow and isolated developments, such as the movement of disgruntled military veterans and truck drivers in KwaZulu-Natal, he said.
Ramaphosa testified neither state security nor government predicted the “nature, extent and ferocity of the events,” and this grave failing was now being addressed. “I guess you could say intelligence failure, security gathering failure ... much of what finally happened, we were not fully forewarned about it,” he said.
Those several days were, he said, as a “terrible chapter” and “an assault on our democracy” in which those behind the acts used a political grievance as the pretext to provoke a “popular insurrection” which ultimately failed.
He insisted those responsible used the chaos as a “smokescreen” to carry out economic sabotage in which SA’s prevailing poverty, unemployment and inequality, all worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown, and provoked ordinary citizens and criminal networks.
“The fundamental cause of the unrest was a deliberate decision by certain individuals to instigate, co-ordinate and incite widespread destruction of property, violence and looting,” he said.
The president accused “peddlers of misinformation” of misrepresenting the events of July 2021 as a “popular uprising of the poor” when information and intelligence shows the anarchy was orchestrated.
It was not, he insisted, the “bubbling over of discontent over an allegedly legitimate political grievance,” but “an attempted insurrection” engineered by masterminds.
Ramaphosa admits his government was “poorly prepared for an orchestrated campaign” and initially proved incapable of responding “swiftly and decisively” when things first began spiralling of control.
Initially, he thought police could handle the situation, but events continued to escalate and in a matter of days it became clear the police service needed reinforcement. Havoc was waged as those participating in the riots blocked major motorways. Scores of looters stormed warehouses, arsonists rased businesses, would-be insurgents targeted infrastructure, with indigents swept up in the bedlam.
Ramaphosa said there was information that national key points, oil refineries and energy plants were among intended targets. After speaking with Cele and others, he decided to deploy thousands of members of the SA National Defence Force.
He said the instigators’ identities and motives were the subject of ongoing police investigation and criminal proceedings would follow. He said “criminal elements” most likely stoked the flames of the unrest. Ramaphosa swore “no expense will be spared” in bringing the unrest’s kingpins to book.
Three months short of a year later, no high profile architect of the unrest has been apprehended, proven guilty and sentenced in a court of law.
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