Poverty and crime leave South Africa standing on ‘precipice of violence’
Resentment and unrest put politicians in fear of an uprising as the ‘Rainbow Nation’ falls apart
The streets of Tembisa looked like a war zone. Burnt-out cars sat like angry tombstones. A municipal building had been turned into a blackened shell. Chunks of concrete and bricks ripped out of nearby walls to form rudimentary barricades lay scattered across the streets. Scorch marks and rubbish were everywhere.
Four people were killed after protests over the rising cost of electricity and water in the poor South African township east of Johannesburg turned violent earlier this month.
It barely made international headlines. Just days later, it was followed by a gang rape of eight young women near a gold mine in another township, Kagiso. That was followed by thousands of angry residents attacking a group of illegal miners they believed to be responsible with machetes, golf clubs and hammers.
Such unrest and disproportionate violence is now becoming normal in South Africa. Amid increasing poverty, inequality and unemployment, the “Rainbow Nation” described by Nelson Mandela when he came to power in 1994 is no more.
Some South Africans are now warning that the country is a tinderbox at risk of wide-scale unrest, or even something similar to the revolutions seen in 2011 across the Arab world.
“One of these days it’s going to happen to us. You can’t have so many people unemployed and poor, one day it is going to trigger an uprising,” former president Thabo Mbeki said in late July.
“That’s how that massive uprising happened in Tunisia, the problems were brewing beneath the surface and it needed a little spark.”
His language has been echoed by opposition leader Julius Malema. “The violence that is going to happen is because the elite is disappearing and the poor are becoming … poorer,” he told the BBC’s Hardtalk programme. “There’s going to be something that looks like an Arab Spring. That, we are guaranteed.”
He said such a movement would target white people and “black elites”. The MP, known for extreme views, has twice been convicted of hate speech.
While the idea of an Arab Springstyle uprising is questionable in South Africa, the government is clearly worried. Last week, the army put hundreds of soldiers on standby amid fears of more violence.
A leaked internal memo said the country was “gradually deteriorating into unrest due to criminality that is taking place with the borders”.
Alarm bells are everywhere. A group of UN human rights experts recently said the country was on “the precipice of explosive violence” in a report on attacks against migrants.
Carol Paton, a veteran political journalist, wrote that events over the last year had shown South Africa was now “an unstable society”.
The core complaint of those behind the violence is poverty. In 2020, around 16.3 million people in South Africa, or 27 per cent of the population, lived in extreme poverty on less than £1.60 a day.
Unemployment stands at more than 34.5 per cent, rising to nearly 64 per cent for the young. Covid devastated hospitality and tourism, a source of many of the country’s jobs, and aggravated already high inequality.
All of that has been made worse by rising food prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The price of cooking oil has doubled, fuel is up 40 per cent and bread nearly a third.
“I now support my husband, who lost his job because of Covid,” said a 42-year-old domestic worker outside a large supermarket in Johannesburg. “We are poorer now than 10 years ago. Food prices are so high.”
She said she is paid about £20 per day and lives in a squatter camp east of the city. ”The government doesn’t build houses any more for poor people. We are scared of violence, but people are poor and they are angry.”
Poverty and crime are also having a knock-on effect on the middle classes.
Professional South Africans are increasingly emigrating. One who went to the UK this year said he “had to go for the sake of our children”.
Others are moving to wealthier and whiter parts of the country which they see as being safer – a phenomenon known as “semigrating”.
But one thing they cannot escape is corruption, the issue at the heart of South Africa’s problems. Most blame former president Jacob Zuma, who was in power from 2009 to 2018.
His network of loyalists undermined South Africa’s tax collection service, bankrupted the massive rail network and national airline, and sabotaged the state electricity corporation.
The total cost to the state was enormous according to Paul Holden, a South African financial investigator who helped assemble documentation for the recently ended commission of inquiry into state corruption under Mr Zuma’s presidency.
“There was a profound social cost,” he said. “The state was robbed of its ability to realise its citizens’ socioeconomic rights. The state was destroyed in a short space of time.”
Despite this, devotion to Mr Zuma in South Africa still runs high at least in his home area, KwaZulu Natal.
An attempt to jail him for refusing to cooperate with the commission of inquiry sparked nine days of looting and rioting mainly in KwaZulu Natal.
More than 350 people were killed and dozens of factories, shops and homes were destroyed.
It was the worst violence since the end of the apartheid era and a sign of how fraught attempts to tackle graft at high levels have become.
Many South Africans had high hopes for Mr Zuma’s successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, who took over in 2018.
But he has been accused of being asleep at the wheel and is also facing his own scandal around an alleged cover-up of a robbery that took place at his private farm in February 2020. Seven opposition parties this week filed a motion of no confidence.
“We have massive disappointment in the post-Zuma era,” said Mavuso Msimang, a politician in the ruling African National Congress.
“We know Cyril is not corrupt, he is just incompetent. We keep on hearing he is playing the long game ... when Rome is burning.”
For those who have helped South Africa find its feet since emerging from the horrors of the apartheid era, the fear is that the country is descending into chaos.
“It is extremely worrying, and reminiscent of some of the worst times of the early Nineties when there was a different enemy,” said Peter Harris, one of the lawyers who managed South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 and a key figure in the country’s transition.
“It is outrageous that this is going on 27 years into our democracy.”
‘You can’t have so many people unemployed and poor. One day, it is going to trigger an uprising’