Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
14-07-2021
JOHANNESBURG: Crowds clashed with police and ransacked or burned shopping malls in South Africa on Tuesday with dozens reported killed as grievances unleashed by the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma boiled over into the worst violence in decades.
Protests that followed Zuma’s arrest last week have widened into looting and an outpouring of generalized anger over inequality that persists 27 years after the fall of apartheid.
Poverty has been exacerbated by severe social and economic restrictions aimed at blocking the spread of COVID-19.
Security officials said the government was working to halt the spread of the violence and looting, which has so far spread from Zuma’s home in KwaZulu-Natal province to Gauteng province surrounding the country’s biggest city Johannesburg.
President Cyril Ramaphosa announced late on Monday he was dispatching troops to help overwhelmed police halt the unrest and “restore order”.
The death toll from five days of violence in South Africa has risen to 72, police said Tuesday, despite President Cyril Ramaphosa’s deployment of troops to quell the unrest.
“The total number of people who have lost their lives since the beginning of these protests …has risen to 72,” police said in a statement.
Most of the deaths, the forces, said “relate to stampedes that occurred during incidents of looting of shops”.
Others were linked to shooting and explosions of bank automatic cash machines.
Tumelo Mosethli, a South African entrepreneur based in Johannesburg, said jobs being lost as a result of the unrest will “exacerbate” the current situation.
“We don’t need this – to see people’s shops and businesses being gutted,” he told media.
“Yes, people are hungry today, but tomorrow there’ll be more unemployment, more pain, more suffering in a nation that is trying to recover and rebuild itself.”
Journalist Fahmida Miller reporting from Johannesburg said the situation in the city was “certainly calmer”.
“It is calm, I think we have military police and soldiers deployed here now, they weren’t here earlier in the day but I also think there possibly isn’t anything left in the stores to loot,” she added.
Tim Murithi of The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation says that while the protests following Zuma’s arrest was expected, the large scale of the uprising was “unexpected”.
“I think what was unexpected was the broad scope, and the wide extent which we’ve seen the uprisings in a number of different cities and towns across at least two provinces,” he told Al Jazeera from Cape Town via Skype.
“The key point is this really reveals the multi-layered nature of the crisis … social, economic disparities, social exclusion that goes back to the apartheid legacy in South Africa, combined with years of misrule, paradoxically, by Jacob Zuma between 2009 and 2018.” (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
