Cops caught looting in South Africa as violence, chaos rages
Police have been busted looting as chaos continues on the streets of South Africa, which has seen the country descend into lawlessness. Warning: Graphic
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Police have been busted looting and further fuelling chaos on the streets of South Africa, as the country descends into lawlessness.
The unrest erupted after former president Jacob Zuma was jailed over corruption charges. His son, Duduzane Zuma, made a plea on Instagram for his father to be freed and urging looters to “do so responsibly”.
“For the people that are protesting and looting, please do so carefully and please do so responsibly. Because you cannot hold people responsible for defending what they love,” Duduzane, 37, said.
He said the government must “feed the poor people that are looting” and that “finger pointing” would not bring an end to the violence.
It came footage emerged of two police officers caught on camera appearing to participate in the looting. The pair were busted with looted supplies and a flat-screen TV in their cars, with rioting and looting spreading to Mpumalanga, Northern Cape and Soweto. Another video showed a man believed to also be a police officer but plain clothes hiding his face after he was hauled out of his car by angry bystanders.
It came as South Africans rallied to protect their property after days of looting and destruction, lending a hand to struggling security forces as President Cyril Ramaphosa considered sending more troops onto the streets.
It comes as the king of South Africa’s Zulu community, the country’s largest ethnic group, appealed for an end to unrest after six days of looting left scores of dead and battered the economy.
“I call for peace,” Misuzulu Zulu said in a maiden speech on state television. The violence “has brought great shame” on the Zulu people, he said. “This chaos is destroying the economy, and it is the poor who will suffer the most,” he warned.
The 46-year-old, who succeeded his father Goodwill Zwelithini who died in March, was flanked by the prime minister of the Zulu nation, Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
Speaking alternately in Zulu and English, the king said “my father’s people are committing suicide” as he called for restraint and peace.
More than 70 people have been killed in the unrest, the worst in South Africa for years, and hundreds of businesses wrecked. Food and fuel supplies are running short.
Triggered by the jailing of ex-president Jacob Zuma last week, after he failed to appear at a corruption inquiry, protests have widened into an orgy of looting and an outpouring of anger over the hardship and inequality that persist in South Africa 27 years after the end of apartheid.
Shopping malls and warehouses have been ransacked or set ablaze in several cities, mostly in Zuma’s home in KwaZulu-Natal province, especially the Indian Ocean port city of Durban, and the financial and economic centre Johannesburg and surrounding Gauteng province.
But in signs of a public backlash, residents in some areas on Wednesday turned suspected looters into police, blocked entrances to malls and in some cases armed themselves as vigilantes to form road blocks or scare them away.
In Vosloorus, southern Johannesburg, minibus taxi operators, many of whom have guns, fired bullets into the air to scare off looters.
“We can’t just allow people from nowhere to come and loot here,” said Paul Magolego, Vosloorus taxi association spokesman, adding that taxi drivers had had no business since Monday because of the unrest.
Underscoring the inherent dangers in such vigilantism, a 15-year-old boy was killed by a stray bullet in Vosloorus, according to a photographer who saw the body. Magolego said the taxi owners arrived on the scene after he was dead.
Meanwhile, in Alexandra township in northern Johannesburg, one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, a Reuters correspondent saw soldiers moving door-to-door to confiscate stolen items, with the help of civilians opposed to the looting.
Citizens armed with guns, many from South Africa’s white minority, blocked off streets to prevent further plundering, in Durban, TV footage showed.
Others were forming online groups to help clean up and rebuild devastated neighbourhoods.
UNREST RAGES
The unrest raged for the sixth day running, stoking fears of food and fuel shortages as disruption to farming, manufacturing and oil refining began to bite.
Seventy-two people have died and more than 1,200 people have been arrested, according to official figures, since former president Jacob Zuma began a 15-month jail term, sparking protests that swiftly turned violent.
Looting has hit supply chains and transport links in the Johannesburg region and the southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, sending a shockwave to goods and services around the country.
In the port city of Durban, people started queuing outside food stores and at fuel stations as early as 4am when the Covid night curfew ends.
The night before, the country’s largest refinery, Sapref, declared “force majeure” — an emergency beyond its control — and shuttered its plant in Durban, shutting down a third of South Africa’s fuel supply.
The firm said the refinery was “temporarily shut down … due to the civil unrest and disruption of supply routes in and out of KwaZulu-Natal.”
Some fuel retailers have begun rationing while others are starting to run dry. “It’s inevitable that we will have fuel shortages in the next couple of days or weeks,” Layton Beard, spokesman for South Africa’s car Association, told AFP.
Outside a branch of a popular supermarket in northern Durban’s Eastman region, around 400 people started lining up to buy food, hours before the shop was due to open.
“With these lootings, it’s an inflection point … this has now seriously compromised our energy security and food security,” warned Bonang Mohale, chancellor of the University of the Free State and a professor of business and economics studies.
“It has created disruption to the coronavirus vaccine rollout and deliveries to hospitals,” he told AFP.
Christo van der Rheede, executive director of the largest farmers’ organisation, AgriSA, said producers were struggling to get their crops to market because the logistic network was in a “shambles”.
“We need the restoration of law and order as soon as possible, because we are going to have a massive humanitarian crisis,” van der Rheede said.
Stores and warehouses have been targeted by looters despite the deployment of 2,500 troops by President Cyril Ramaphosa to help the overwhelmed police force.
But these boots on the ground are dwarfed in numbers by the more than 70,000 troops deployed to enforce last year’s coronavirus lockdown.
Only a handful of soldiers have been seen at some shopping centres. The TV footage has been a visceral shock for many South Africans, showing crowds of looters casually hauling away refrigerators, large televisions, microwave ovens, fashion goods and crates of food and alcohol.
The pillaging swiftly followed protests over the jailing of former president Zuma, who is viewed by radicals and many grassroots members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) as a defender of the poor.
Zuma, 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 administration.
He started serving the term on Thursday after handing himself in to authorities. He is seeking to have the ruling set aside.
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