Unrest an insurgency, says Mbeki trust
The economic sabotage and wanton destruction of property and infrastructure witnessed in the past week cannot be accepted as incidental, the Thabo Mbeki Foundation (TMF) said at the weekend.
SA was harvesting “the bitter fruits of a counter-revolutionary insurgency that has long been germinating in the bowels of what we commonly call ‘state capture’”.
“We recall that the current situation was foreshadowed by open threats of civil war and unrest,” the foundation said.
As the deadline loomed for former president Jacob Zuma to hand himself over to the authorities to start his 15-month sentence for contempt of court for failing to abide by a Constitutional Court order to testify at the state capture commission, his supporters had warned that SA would descend into a civil war if he was jailed.
“The pressing socioeconomic conditions of our people and the recent arrest of former president Jacob Zuma have served as a perfect set to mount an offensive against the state and the constitutional democratic edifice on which it is built,” the TMF said.
In the early 2000s, Mbeki and Zuma were involved in a bitter power struggle for control of the governing ANC and, by extension, of the country.
This culminated in Mbeki firing Zuma as SA’s deputy president in June 2005 over corruption allegations involving Zuma’s erstwhile financial adviser Schabir Shaik.
Zuma, however, weaved his way back into the corridors of power by defeating Mbeki for the ANC presidency at the party’s elective conference in Polokwane in December 2007.
Eight months later, in September 2008, Mbeki was forced to resign as president after being recalled by the ANC, which Zuma now led.
In its statement, the TMF lashed out at misinformation around the recent unrest and called on “all South Africans and all sectors of our society to refuse to be misled and fall victim to masters of the dark arts designed to exploit our challenges as a people”.
It said the democratic dispensation had not delivered on its promise of better socioeconomic conditions, but also acknowledged that the Covid pandemic had worsened what was already a difficult position.
The foundation called on the government and its social partners to urgently design and implement economic recovery plans consistent with the blueprint tabled by President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2020. The president has also said the unrest was instigated.
Ramaphosa announced the economic reconstruction and recovery plan in October 2020. It hinges on an expanded public employment programme, a R1-trillion infrastructure effort mostly leveraged from the private sector, a pledge to speed up energy generation, and a raft of structural economic reforms.
Though the Covid-19 vaccination programme was giving hope, the “petty pace of implementation helps to sustain a lingering sense of insecurity”, the foundation said. More than 5million people have been vaccinated against the coronavirus that has infected more than 2.2-million people and killed more than 66,000 in SA.
The pandemic has battered the economy and resulted in the loss of more than 1.4-million jobs as businesses shut their doors during the lockdowns imposed to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
The TMF called on the government and law enforcement agencies to bring those behind “this counter-revolutionary insurgency” to book.
Police minister Bheki Cele has said they have a list of 12 suspects they are pursuing but did not name them or what charges they could face.
WE RECALL THAT THE CURRENT SITUATION WAS FORESHADOWED BY OPEN THREATS OF CIVIL WAR AND UNREST