South Africa in flames

Why the violence

Many reasons have been offered for the violence, looting, racist bile and bloodshed that erupted. These include:

• the pent-up frustration of hungry and cold people facing few prospects for socio-economic improvement
• inequality and the gulf between the conspicuous consumption of the “made it” compared to others
• ethnic tensions within the ANC, with the president representing a “minority” tribe and apparently lacking legitimacy
• good old stereotypical Zulu nationalist violence was breaking out as it did in the early 1990s
• internal ANC factional tensions were spilling onto the streets; and more.

All of these have some truth. Yet none provides a narrative thread that ties together these disparate issues and scattered but clearly organised acts of violence. Part of the gap in our understanding is how a middle-of-the-night incarceration of Zuma – albeit done in the blaze of TV arc lights – led to such a widespread and destructive but apparently spontaneous outbreak.

This narrative suits Zuma and his supporters perfectly: pity for the victimised former president unleashed patriotic fervour that was unstoppable, proving his popularity and victim status. Family, the Zuma Foundation and others all began pumping out the narrative – much as Zuma’s daughter tweeted the video of a gun firing bullets into a poster of Ramaphosa. Subtlety did not play much of a role.

But when the Minister of State Security reported on the morning of Tuesday 13 July that her spies had managed to stop attacks on substations, planned attacks on ANC offices and in Durban-Westville prison, things began to look different. How did they know of the plans, and for how long? Who was doing the planning? How did they stop it?

When “impeccable sources in the intelligence service and law enforcement” warned of arms caches at Zuma’s home, Nkandla; when we recall that the police admitted to “losing” some 20,000 weapons in the 2000s, as had the State Security Agency, we are permitted to ask uncomfortable questions.

Suddenly the acts look rather more organised and rather less spontaneous.

Neeshan Balton, executive director of the not-for-profit lobby group, the Kathrada Foundation, has suggested that part of the strategy was a wildfire – strike lots of matches and just let them burn whatever is in their path to destabilise the democratic project.

This too is premised on the existence of a plan.

The danger with suggesting that this was not at heart a set of random acts by poor people who were overcome by emotion at the thought of Zuma in prison but rather a (more or less well) planned and executed attempt to destabilise the state is that rather than “joining the dots” as Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan advised, one may be constructing a crazy conspiracy theory.

The definition of insurrection is to rise against the power of the state, generally using weaponry. Conspiracies exist. From dark warnings of another massacre like the one at Marikana in 2012 should Zuma be touched, to planning sabotage against municipal infrastructure, and fanning the flames of xenophobic violence, it seems very difficult to ignore the planned insurrection at hand.

Poor and hungry people exist, and the state should be ashamed. But hungry people do not become violent looters on behalf of better-known looters who are in jail. They may well be available for mobilisation (looting, violence, marching) behind the organisers – but it is the organisers that need to be brought to book, and who must also face the rule of law.

Corruption thrives in a destabilised state with weak institutions. South Africa cannot be allowed back to that space because there will be no turning back.

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David Everatt is professor of Urban Governance, University of the Witwatersrand

Source: theconversation