ON Friday 8 July, just over a day after Jacob Zuma was jailed, a distressed truck driver phoned SAFM radio to say that he was being attacked on the N3, southern Africa’s main economic highway between the port of Durban and the Reef. This was nothing new and one of scores of similar cases in the last two years that were ostensibly about foreign drivers. It has long since been clear that truck arson is a specialised skill and needs organisation, especially at multiple sites on the same night. Yet the government apparently did nothing to investigate it and no one has been prosecuted: just another of those South African hazards.
Soon the torched truck count was over 30. By Sunday night the Edendale Mall in Pietermaritzburg was on fire and being looted, followed by Brookside at dawn. During the day Scottville Mall and the centre of town were attacked together with a supermarket and a petrol station at Mkondeni. Our suburb is not that close to all this action, but our house was full of smoke and we could hear sporadic police gunfire all day. The next day the China Mall and Makro at Camp Drift were hit. Bodies have now been found inside Makro; I suspect casualties of over-eager looting of towering warehouse shelves. Wednesday night and Thursday brought the first respite.
The government’s response has been purely reactive. Why was the N3 not secured by the military on Friday; it was quite clear what was happening. Overstretched South African police have rushed from looted mall to looted mall well after the event and firing rubber bullets at lingering scavengers. Traffic and municipal police have simply vaporised. Only on Wednesday was the military deployed; and fully mobilised on Thursday. In Pietermaritzburg we have seen one vehicle driven by military police. The sequence is typical: ANC failure to take proactive action on anything while they debate the ideological angles and policy.
There can be no doubt that this is a popular revolt by the poor and hungry at the end of their tether after years of ANC misrule and corruption and now Covid-19 restrictions. It is also perfectly logical. Zuma and his cronies plundered the State at every level as the media and Raymond Zondo’s commission have shown. Now it is the turn of the masses. Moeletsi Mbeki has for twenty years constantly pointed out that the ANC has created a tinderbox that simply needed a convenient spark. It predictably turned out to be the racketeer Zuma, although Mbeki argued implausibly that it could have been a football match.
But the trend of events coupled with social media postings suggests something other than just the spontaneous; as did the last two years of truck burnings. Looting food and household goods plus bottle stores is one thing. Concerted attacks on vast warehouses, factories and some infrastructure another. Put this together with social media postings and you have a trail of possible evidence leading to perpetrators. The postings list so-called-WMC (White Monopoly Capital) targets such as Checkers, Pick ‘n Pay and Capitec. But looters tend to lack discrimination so black businesses have suffered too: wild plans tend to boomerang. Circumstantial evidence points to the RET (Radical Economic Transformation) faction, the MKMVA (MK Military Veterans Association), treacherous elements in the intelligence service, several shady extremist Zulu-nationalist business forums, and organised crime. All have an interest in reversion to a state of plunder characterised by the Zuma regime.
The media has wisely abandoned the terms political protest and unrest and are using the word insurrection. Some journalists are now suggesting we are experiencing an attempted coup. There are apparently twelve suspected leaders including an intelligence operative and a retired army officer, although we are somewhat short on other names at present. In the possible mix are a former DJ and radio presenter and a daughter of Zuma’s; the one with the Parisian-style wedding and R1.5 million diamond necklace who is now a devoted revolutionary. Any or all of these people, and others, could be facing charges of treason.
South Africa has so often been at turning and tipping points, it’s enough to make you dizzy. But there is hope that this one may be real. In essence this is an ANC civil war. The ANC has consistently raised its interests above those of the State. But if a significant part of the ANC is involved in treason and orchestrated economic sabotage, it should be dawning on the rest of the party that it may soon have no State left to rule. With the interests of party and State at last moving into rough alignment, South Africa might yet be saved. A state of emergency and a government of national unity could also help. Is the ANC bold enough to save the nation?
Moving around has not been easy in the last week and admiration must be extended to journalists covering events often at great risk. One issue that is only now being covered is vigilantism after the discovery of fifteen bodies at Phoenix (Durban), possibly murdered looters. There are chilling shades of the mid-1980s inter-communal conflict here. In a very limited way I’ve been doing some investigation in our area of Pietermaritzburg.
In the Hayfields, Scottsville and Cleland area are numerous informal road blocks that make U-turns an increasingly familiar driving manoeuvre. Most are fairly pathetic, but to be fair the three that cordon off our local shopping centres and petrol station seem to have worked so far. Neighbourhoods have blocked off side streets with a remarkable variety of flotsam including someone’s double bed. Many junctions are permanently staffed by locals with a wood-burning brazier for the now-freezing nights and food supplies, armed with golf clubs and hockey sticks. They are not interfering with anyone and harmlessly occupying workless days.
But elsewhere are posses of heavily armed, burly white men. It’s as if we are back in the 1980s with the local chapter of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Resistance Movement) emerging from the apartheid-era woodwork. Each day this week I have interviewed members at four different roadblocks. And I have gleaned the following: they are prepared to shoot live ammunition; they have intercepted carloads of loot and ‘roughed up’ the occupants; and they are extremely edgy and defensive. They appear not to be working with the police and the mayor of Msunduzi has called their roadblocks unlawful; and for their demolition. The public display of weapons is illegal unless under the authority of the security forces. Two of my encounters have been yet more revealing.
Early in the morning out doing daily exercise along one of my routes I was told I could not walk down a particular road that had been blocked to traffic. A black security guard (Red Alert) was sent after me demanding to know my name, address and purpose. I told him to buzz off. However, the day before I was in Hesketh Drive taking photos of traffic chaos as some shops partly re-opened. In my viewfinder were men carrying rifles and an axe and women with baseball bats aggressively directing vehcles. I lingered too long and was confronted by a seemingly demented large man who tried to take my camera and then pursued me for 300 metres down the road screaming abuse at me. His elegant and eloquent parting shot was ‘If I ever f****** see you and your f****** camera again I’ll f****** kill you.’ Not a frustrated poet; definitely a man on the edge and not fit to be engaging the public.
It’s not an offence to walk down a public road unless you are stopped by an officer of the law. It is indeed an offence to take pictures of national keypoints or of security force personnel, their vehicles and buildings; but none of these were present, just a bunch of armed neo-Nazis in a traffic jam. My foul-mouthed antagonist knew he and his friends were acting illegally; thus their fear of photographs. Well here is one for the record posted to the world at large.
Earlier I had talked to an upset black woman shopper who was being shouted at by another white man who sounded mentally challenged. And interviewing a local friendly group of guards the next day I was told by one that he had been not far from me and witnessed a white man pulling a gun and pointing it at the head of another black female shopper; another criminal act.
We hear a great deal about the rule of law, now from the ANC that has long subverted it. But there is clear evidence in my limited experience that looters are not the only people making a mockery of it. A bunch of neo-fascist thugs are apparently protecting us and I’m prepared to bet that they will not simply disappear once all this is over. Food and medicine insecurity is not our only challenge.