President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday said the deadly unrest gripping the country is unprecedented in post-apartheid South Africa as he deployed troops to help police crush the violence and looting sparked by the jailing of ex-president Jacob Zuma.<\/p>\n
Soldiers were sent onto the streets of the country’s two most densely populated provinces of Gauteng, which houses the country’s economic hub Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma’s home province.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
“Over the past few days and nights, there have been acts of public violence of a kind rarely seen in the history of our democracy,” said Ramaphosa in a televised address to the nations, adding he was speaking with “a heavy heart”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Overwhelmed police are facing mobs who have ransacked stores, carting away anything from crates of alcohol to beds, refrigerators and bath tubs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Ten people have died, some with gunshot wounds sustained before the army was deployed, and 489 people have been arrested.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Ramaphosa said he had “authorised the deployment of defence force personnel in support of the operations” of the police.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Earlier the army said they will assist police “to quell the unrest that has gripped both provinces in the last few days”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
It was the second successive day Ramaphosa, addressed the nation on the violence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The violence raged as the Constitutional Court heard an application to review its landmark decision to jail Zuma for contempt of court. Judgement was reserved after a marathon 10-hour sitting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The country’s top court on June 29 slapped Zuma with a 15-month term for snubbing a probe into the corruption that stained his nine years in power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Zuma began the sentence last Thursday but is seeking to have the ruling set aside.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
“This court made fundamentally rescindable errors,” Zuma’s lawyer Dali Mpofu argued in an on-line hearing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But one of the judges, Steven\u00a0Majiedt, bluntly said Zuma had been convicted “because he disobeyed the order of this court”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Mpofu responded that Zuma was being “punished for more than the disobedience” of a court order.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Despite his reputation for graft and scandal, the 79-year-old former anti-apartheid fighter remains popular among many poor South Africans.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The epicentre of the unrest is Zuma’s home region, the southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal. In its capital Pietermaritzburg smoke billowed from the roof of a large shopping mall. Banks, shops and fuel stations in the city were shut.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Retail shops in Durban and Johannesburg were ransacked Monday while police watched.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In Johannesburg, in Gauteng province, an AFP photographer saw a corpse at one site.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A police helicopter hovered over the Johannesburg suburb of Soweto, where looters casually made off with giant TV sets, microwave ovens, clothes and linen, for hours.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Many businesses were shuttered.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A mall in Johannesburg’s upmarket Rosebank suburb closed early following “a tipoff that the looters are on their way,” a security guard told AFP.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In the meantime, chemists helping the government’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign warned that the unrest gripping the country would slow inoculations in the continent’s worst-hit country as “vaccination sites have been destroyed and looted”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
“Our vaccination programme has been severely disrupted just as it is gaining momentum,” said Ramaphosa.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The unrest began on Friday, taking the form of protests triggered by Zuma’s detention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But looting swiftly took over, reflecting the levels of hardship in a country hit by catastrophic unemployment and a toughening of anti-Covid restrictions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Once dubbed the “Teflon president,” Zuma started serving the jail term after handing himself into authorities as a deadline for surrender loomed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
On Friday he lost a petition at the Pietermaritzburg High Court to have his case thrown out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
An anti-graft panel is probing the massive siphoning off of state assets that occurred during Zuma’s 2009-2018 presidency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
He testified just once, in July 2019, but then swiftly withdrew his cooperation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Under the terms of his sentence, Zuma could be back home long before Christmas as he would be eligible for parole in less than four months.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
He is due back in court on July 19 for a separate case where he faces 16 charges of fraud, graft and racketeering in an arms procurement scandal dating to 1999, when he was vice president.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n