Saturday Citizen reports that Gauteng premier David Makhura said on Friday that a preliminary estimation showed that R3.5 billion in damages had been caused by the recent unrest in parts of the province and 14,500 jobs had been affected by the violence.
He was speaking at a media briefing on the province’s economic recovery efforts and the Covid pandemic. However, Makhura advised Gauteng would not be declaring a provincial state of disaster, like the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) government did on Thursday. He indicated that the impact of the damage to infrastructure in the province had not been as extensive as in KZN. “I want to repeat that in our province, we basically suffered the destruction of businesses and the displacement and destruction of property. This is trading property. The unrest impact on Gauteng is different from the impact in KZN. So, there were no factories here or warehouses that were attacked,” Makhura reported. He added that despite the limited damage to infrastructure in Gauteng, the impact on small businesses and the livelihoods of residents had been more severe. Makhura indicated that 30 out of 500 township malls in the province had been attacked. “What we are looking at is how do we bring back these business operations. We are going to work with the national government on the [economic] packages announced,” he said.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Thapelo Lekabe on page 8 of Saturday Citizen of 31 July 2021
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