Inequality has turned SA into a tinderbox, says expert on July riots report

The ANC’s internal strife has become one of the country’s biggest security threats, with experts saying the official indictment on government for failing to stop the July riots or bring instigators to book was hardly surprising.

On Monday, President Cyril Ramaphosa released the report of a panel of experts appointed to look into, among other things, the cause of the riots which swept through KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.

The panel concluded catastrophic failures by the police, intelligence structures and the executive to quell the violence resulted in destruction and looting, which wiped R50 billion from the economy, left more than 354 people dead and scores others injured.

Early warning bells had been sounded over growing discontent, but the panel also concluded ANC internal differences played a role.

“… the internal differences within the governing party, the ANC, contributed to the unrest and should be addressed as a matter of national security now … what appears to be factional battles in the ANC, have become a serious source of instability in the country,” the panel warned.

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This was a matter of “great concern”, the panel lamented, and the reasons for this state of affairs needed to be identified sooner, rather than later.

“According to many of the submissions we received, the incarceration of [former president Jacob Zuma] … was the spark that ignited the orgy of violence that followed,” the panel concluded.

It also said: “Internal contradictions within the ANC are impacting negatively on governance matters and need to be resolved.”

Part of the reason police failed to protect life, limb and property was the lack of resources, including rubber bullets, as well as a crisis in crime intelligence. University of Free State anthropologist Professor Theodore Petrus said the findings were not surprising, as police had been grappling these issues for years.

He said government’s lacklustre response to issues of safety and security came on the back of budget cuts to the police. He questioned the logic in the state expecting police to be effective when it was not supplying them with resources, suggesting maybe the state was not serious about crime.

“If that is the case, it may well support or confirm what seems to be happening in other countries, where there is always somebody benefiting from the chaos and disorder and, in certain instances, it is the state itself that benefits from the state of chaos and disorder.

“Is that the case with our country? It is difficult to say without evidence, but if one has to look at the manner in which the state is addressing what is happening now in all our law enforcement structures, then I would not
blame anybody for thinking that maybe the state is benefiting,” Petrus said.

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University of Johannesburg professor Jane Duncan, who has written on how the intelligence and security apparatus failed the country during the unrest, said the report confirms the widely held view that intelligence and security services were not up to the task of responding to the July 2021 unrest, but has provided new information.

What she welcomed about the report was that it did not offer mono-causal explanations of the unrest and that it was clear there were multiple actors who fed off one another. According to Duncan, it is also clear that SA’s inequality, worsened by Covid, turned the country into a tinderbox, and admonishing the government for failing
to deal with these issues is an important message.

“While it has clarified that the SSA [State Security Agency] provided intelligence in the run-up to Zuma’s incarceration, the intelligence provided was contradictory.

“This raises questions about the quality of the intelligence provided.”

Duncan said it was not as though there were not intelligence coordinating structures but that there appeared to be too many structures and too little coordination, which raises questions about their effectiveness.

– siphom@citizen.co.za