Posted on 07/13/2021 8:16:37 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Johannesburg: Stores and warehouses in South Africa were hit by looters on Tuesday for a fifth day running despite a move by President Cyril Ramaphosa to deploy troops in a bid to quell unrest that has claimed 72 lives.
As large-scale pillaging erupted in the economic capital of Johannesburg and southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, the crisis burst into the political arena, where South Africa’s main opposition accused radicals of stoking the unrest.
The armed forces were sending 2,500 soldiers to help the police, who have been utterly overwhelmed.
But these numbers are dwarfed by the more than 70,000 troops deployed to enforce last year’s coronavirus lockdown, and only handful of soldiers were seen at some shopping centres.
The raging unrest first erupted last Friday after former president Jacob Zuma started serving a 15-month term for contempt after snubbing a probe into the corruption that stained his nine years in power.
By the weekend it started spreading to Gauteng province.
“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 late Tuesday.
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.
With the recent deployment of soldiers, police said “more boots have been on the ground”.
The number of arrests have risen to 1,234, although many thousands have been involved in the ransacking sprees.
Police showed up three hours later, and fired rubber bullets and soldiers followed much later.
In Alexandra township north of Johannesburg, hundreds of people streamed in and out of a shopping mall, freely picking up groceries.
In Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal’s capital, people hauled boxed refrigerators through bushes to a long line of cars that were parked along a highway.
In Durban, aerial footage showed hundreds of people looting a large shopping centre and carting off huge boxes of goods.
A woman was seen throwing her young baby from the first floor of a building in bid to save her from fire after retail shops below her block of apartments, was set on fire in downtown Durban. The child safely landed in the hands of a group of people on the street.
“The path of violence, of looting and anarchy, leads only to more violence and devastation,” Ramaphosa said.
But the crisis took a political twist on Tuesday as the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, announced it would file criminal charges on Wednesday against Zuma’s children and the leader of the leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Julius Malema.
In a statement, the party accused them of using “social media to express comments which appear to encourage and incite the violence and looting.”
Once dubbed the “Teflon president,” Zuma was handed the jail term on June 29 by the Constitutional Court for bucking an order to appear before a commission probing the graft that proliferated under his nine years in power.
He started serving the jail term on Thursday after handing himself in to authorities as a deadline for his surrender loomed.
He is seeking to have the ruling against him set aside. The Constitutional Court has reserved its judgement on his application to rescind its ruling.
He rose in democratic South Africa to vice president and then president, before being ousted by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in 2018 as graft scandals proliferated.
But he remains popular among many poor South Africans, especially grassroots members of the ANC, who portray him as a defender of the disadvantaged.
South Africa, Africa’s most industrialised country, is deep in an economic malaise, with cripplingly high levels of unemployment. Economic activity had already been badly affected by restrictions to stop the spread of coronavirus.
PW Botha was right.
[EXCERPT]
At least 75 people have been killed in South Africa as the country remains in the grip of its worst unrest since the end of apartheid following the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma.
Footage shared on social media on Tuesday night appeared to show the Lenmed Hospital in Durban in flames while other videos showed shopkeepers opening fire on a crowd of looters.
Ten people were trampled to death during a stampede at a looted shopping mall in Soweto, Johannesburg as police and military eventually responded to the chaos, firing stun grenades and rubber bullets to try to halt the unrest.
South Africa is “Third World”.I know...I’ve been there.
Any one looking for up to date news, in YouTube search for SABC - they have lots of video coverage of the riots in South Africa
BLM in action.
Somebody else said it better: Africa wins again.
I don’t know how they think this will make the situation better.
I took a course in “Race and Politics in Southern Africa” in 1979. Even though this wasn’t what was taught, it’s what I learned. I knew then this is how South Africa would wind up once Apartheid was inevitably overthrown.
Looks like Chicago except for the armed security.
They pissed and moaned for black majority rule. Now they want black minority rule here.
better ideas
car dealerships
airport cargo terminal
gun stores
Looks like the same ones that cause all the destruction here.
I noticed off last night reporting....food shortages now reported. Grocery operations can’t rebuild overnight, and a lot of them have been gutted out. I’ll predict by this weekend....some national emergency situation requiring international help to feed the riot folks.
They need to use something besides rubber bullets to stop this.
As long as the looters know they are in no real danger, they will continue.
Seems to me that the looters all have one thing in common, but the shop keepers and LE and military have something else in common.
Can’t quite put my finger on it…..
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