Jacob Zuma or undocumented foreigners are not the real cause of riots

For about a week in July last year, South Africans came face-to-face with anarchy. The country got a glimpse of what would happen if an Arab Spring type of uprising was to happen here.

The result would be mayhem. Add to that violent deaths, a racial war as was seen in Phoenix and the destruction of infrastructure.

So, all right-thinking and law-abiding South Africans should be overjoyed at the arrest of the more than 20 instigators of the deadly riots that followed former president Jacob Zuma’s incarceration, following his contempt of court charge for walking out of the Zondo commission. Or should they?

It is amazing that a police force that has had its intelligence hollowed out and politically aligned to ruling party factions has managed to outsmart social media-savvy instigators and linked them to specific accounts of looting and destruction.

But it is equally depressing that it is the same police force that proved totally inadequate at the height of the riots. Their ineptness is not the only worrying thing, it is the lack of political leadership that happened at the time.

And this is why the celebrations over arrests must stay muted: what plan is there to prevent a repeat of July 2021? The riots happened because the instigators lit the fuse, but the explosive material was not Zuma.

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The explosive material had been there long before Zuma became a rallying point. It is the masses of youth who are forced to sit at home because they are unemployed. The worsening economic crisis that South Africa and the world faces was magnified by the pandemic and it didn’t need a genius to get people out in the streets wreaking havoc.

This is not to suggest that instigators must not get what is coming to them. They must face the full wrath of the law (even though this country’s legal system might still bungle the case). But President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government needs to focus on the fundamental causes of the riots.

The deepening inequality between the wealthiest people in this country and the poorest is what should be the greatest concern of Ramaphosa’s government because that is what makes it so easy for any political charlatan to claim victimhood and whip up political emotions to volatile levels in a very short space of time.

It does not help that the government itself has been trying hard to stand out like a sore thumb in the stakes of wasteful expenditure. When unemployed and hungry people read reports that parliament is authorising the spending of R1.5 million per vehicle for a new fleet for very well-paid politicians it says to them it is okay to loot.

Whenever politicians are caught with their fingers in the cookie jar, their actions give permission for protesters to act in a lawless fashion when they are out in the streets.

Along with prosecuting the instigators, the president and his government must put extraordinary effort into defusing the time bomb that is the inequality that characterises South African society. That is the most difficult part of governing – providing a credible vision to a nation in perpetual crisis.

Otherwise, populists will provide a very temporary but destructive vision like the country saw during the July riots. Jacob Zuma or undocumented foreigners might be the rallying point, but the real cause is economic.