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BL Premium reports that the government has stated that the acts of public violence and looting that threaten the country’s economic prospects are sabotage and not just a spontaneous response to former president Jacob Zuma’s imprisonment.
What began as sporadic instances of violence on 7 July as a response to Zuma being jailed for defying a court order, rapidly spread to Gauteng from KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), threatening food and medicine supply chains. It also stalled the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. “It was all [a] smokescreen,” police minister Bheki Cele said after assessing damage to property in Gauteng and KZN. Separately, he told Business Day that investigations and prosecutions of suspects connected to the mayhem, which by Wednesday had left more than 70 dead and disrupted the N3 highway, a key route for transporting everything from cars to medicine, would reveal whether anyone should be charged with treason. While Cele was reluctant to expand any further and made no comments about whether people linked to Zuma were directly involved in planning the violence, he gave the first clear indication of the security agencies’ thinking about the source of the violence. Bloomberg reported that Cele sidestepped questions about whether Zuma’s daughter Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla was being investigated, saying only that as many as 12 people were on the radar of authorities for stoking the riots. The news agency reported Mzwanele Manyi, a spokesperson for the Jacob Zuma Foundation, as saying that there was no link between the violence and tweets by Zuma-Sambudla. Business organisations, including the body representing most of the country’s commercial property owners, believe the violence was planned and orchestrated,
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Thando Maeko at BusinessLive (paywall access only)
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