Stores in two South African provinces were ransacked on Tuesday for a fifth consecutive day, hours after President Cyril Ramaphosa deployed troops during a bid to quell unrest that has claimed 45 lives.
The premier of Gauteng province, which incorporates Johannesburg, said 10 bodies were found late on Monday at a looted plaza in Soweto, on the city’s outskirts.
“The police discovered within the evening that 10 people died during (a) stampede,” provincial premier David Makhura told reporters. The price for Gauteng stood at 19 deaths, he said.
Earlier, Sihle Zikalala, premier of the southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, said 26 people there had died.
“These were people killed during stampedes as protesters ran riot,” Zikalala said, without specifying locations.
TV footage showed dozens of girls , some wearing their dressing gowns, men and even children strolled into a butcher’s cold store in of Soweto, beginning balancing heavy boxes of frozen meat on their shoulders or heads.
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A sole private watchman stood by helplessly, frantically trying to form calls.
Police showed up three hours later, and fired rubber bullets. In Alexandra township north of Johannesburg, many people streamed in and out of a mall , freely learning groceries.
Other images showed a warehouse being looted in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal’s capital.
People hauled boxed refrigerators through bushes to an extended line of cars that were parked along a highway. a minimum of 757 people are arrested, Police Minister Bheki Cele told a press conference , with most of the arrests happening in Johannesburg, South Africa’s economic capital.
Sounding a note of optimism, he insisted the police would make sure the situation “does not deteriorate any longer .” In his nationwide address Monday night, Ramaphosa lashed “opportunistic acts of criminality, with groups of individuals instigating chaos merely as a canopy for looting and theft.” it had been “of vital importance that we restore calm and stability to all or any parts of the country at once ,” he said.
“The path of violence, of looting and anarchy, leads only to more violence and devastation,” Ramaphosa said.
Crowds clashed with police and ransacked or burned shopping malls in South Africa, with dozens reported killed as grievances unleashed by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma boiled over. More photos: https://t.co/sWdzWQarQ1 pic.twitter.com/EeU0lqu5Lk
— Reuters Pictures (@reuterspictures) July 13, 2021
The unrest erupted last Friday after Zuma started serving a 15-month term for snubbing a search into the corruption that stained his nine years in power.
Once dubbed the “Teflon president,” Zuma was handed the jail term on Saints Peter and Paul by the Constitutional Court for bucking an order to seem before a commission probing the graft that proliferated under his nine years in power.
He started serving the jail term on Thursday after handing himself in to authorities as a deadline for surrender loomed. he’s seeking to possess the ruling put aside .
The Constitutional Court sat for 10 hours on Monday hearing from Zuma’s lawyers asking the court review its ruling. But the court reserved its judgement to a later, but unspecified date.
Zuma, 79, may be a former anti-apartheid fighter who spent 10 years in jail within the notorious Robben Island jail off Cape Town .
He rose in democratic South Africa to vice chairman then president, before being ousted by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in 2018 as graft scandals proliferated.
But he remains popular among many poor South Africans, especially grassroots members of the ANC, who portray him as a defender of the disadvantaged.
