City Press reports that Durban has borne the brunt of the ongoing unrest, with 45,000 businesses out of commission, an estimated R16 billion in stolen stock, and damage to infrastructure and equipment.
eThekwini Mayor Mxolisi Kaunda made this announcement during a media briefing on Wednesday, as the city began to count the costs of the impact of the riots. Preliminary estimates of the economic impact revealed that the unrest had cost the metro “R1 billion in terms of loss of stock and about R15 billion of damage to property and equipment”. Kaunda said that 5,000 informal traders had been severely affected by the criminality that has wreaked havoc in the coastal city, with a further “40,000 formal business also affected, including small businesses”. The expectation was that a large portion of those small businesses “may never recover from this upheaval”. A staggering 129,000 jobs are at risk, following the destruction of malls, factories and certain industries with “a large portion of those workers” likely to be added to the country’s skyrocketing unemployment figures. In Durban and surrounding areas, rioters breached the perimeter of the Massmart distribution centre in Riverhorse Valley on Monday night, and the targeting of malls and industrial warehouses has been the order of the day since then. Despite the announcement that the SA National Defence Force would be deployed in the city to relieve a flagging police contingent, wanton theft continued and people streamed in and out of the warehouse on Tuesday and Wednesday.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Juniour Khumalo at City Press
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