Riots: Zuma and Ramaphosa both to blame
AT THE time of writing the riots engulfing Durban and other towns in KwaZulu-Natal, and also present in parts of Gauteng and the Eastern Cape, have the kind of scale and velocity that makes definitive statements unwise.
There are sure to be local differences in how things are playing out, and new developments can and will happen at any moment. The full consequences of the decision to send in the army are not yet clear.
But one thing is: Durban has been engulfed by food riots. New Frame spoke to grassroots activists across the city on July 11 and 12 and without exception every one of them said the riots are about food, not Jacob Zuma. It is food shops that have been consistently targeted, and food that has been appropriated at a massive scale.
Of course, the spark was lit by the displays of impunity and acts of disruption and arson carried out by Zuma supporters, but this was the spark to the tinder. With mass impoverishment, unemployment and hunger, the only surprise is that this did not happen earlier.
The scale of the riots is not the only new development. The protests that have regularly been organised from shack settlements across the country since 2004, and in Durban since 2005, have generally taken the form of road blockades . Now there is popular appropriation of food on an extraordinary scale.
Some of the initial acts organised by the pro-Zuma forces were carried out with the same modus operandi on the same terrain as recent xenophobic violence, often ethnically inflected: the Mooi River Toll Plaza and hostels in Johannesburg. But at the moment New Frame is not getting reports of a xenophobic dimension to the riots.
Riots are always messy, and elite eyes will always seek to reduce a riot to an appropriated TV or an attack on a bystander. Although other buildings have been attacked, and a mosque burnt in circumstances that are not yet clear, the primary target of the riots so far is supermarkets. There is an implicit logic to this. In South Africa, the food system is overwhelmingly controlled by supermarkets, and when most people do access some money, most of it goes into the supermarkets. They are also, of course, sites of a vast accumulation of wealth by elites.
It is not just the trajectory of the riots, and what the deployment of the army will mean, that cannot yet be determined. It is also their aftermath. Many grassroots activists have expressed concern about how the destruction under way may affect their access to food in the coming days and the jobs of people who depend on the supermarket system.
There is deep concern about escalating violence, and disgust at the political and personal opportunism that has been present.
It was Ramaphosa’s government that policed the lockdown with militarised and frequently lethal violence. Food is a basic human need, but Ramaphosa’s government failed to support the millions of people who went hungry with anything approaching an adequate response. The Covid-19 grant was paltry, didn’t reach huge numbers of people and was then – inexplicably, callously, recklessly and outrageously – removed. Zuma and Ramaphosa are both responsible for the crisis that has now exploded into riot.
Whatever the trajectory of the riots, and whether they are crushed by the army, burn themselves out in a few days or continue, cohere around a central demand and gather more force, they have happened and it is now clear that there can be no fantasies of business as usual.