South Africa is still counting the cost of losing 350 lives, nearly two million jobs and US$3.33 billion worth of damage to property during the two-week July 2021 unrest that President Cyril Ramaphosa on Friday described as “an attempted insurrection.”
The president said this during his opening remarks at the South African Human Rights Commission’s hearings into the unrest that unfolded in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces eight months ago, which were triggered by the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma.
“What this country experienced was not a popular uprising of the poor as the peddlers of misinformation sought to characterise the events at the time,” Ramaphosa said.
He added: “It was not the bubbling over of discontent over an allegedly legitimate political grievance. It was an attempted insurrection.”
Ramaphosa said the country was still counting the economic costs of the unrest with at least US$3.33 billion “wiped off” the economy, and at least two million jobs lost or impacted due to the looting and destruction of businesses.
According to him, “the chaos was used as a smokescreen to carry out acts of economic sabotage like attacks on commercial trucks carrying goods, the raiding and torching of shopping malls, factories and warehouses, and the blocking of roads and highways vital to economic activity.”
“That economic infrastructure was targeted in the manner that it was, shows clearly that the intention was to bring our economy to its knees – and thereby destabilise our democracy,” the president said.
He added that despite the devastation, South Africans stood up against those who carried out and instigated the unrest.
“But try as they might, they did not turn us against each other. To the contrary, South Africans came together as never before,” he said.
NM/jn/APA