President Cyril Ramaphosa has taken responsibility for government’s failure to combat and contain the July 2021 unrest, telling the South African Human Rights Commission’s (SAHRC) investigative hearing on Friday that the government was ill-prepared.
The president also acknowledged the intelligence’s failure, saying that while there were warnings, intelligence did not anticipate what lay ahead.
“We have acknowledged that as government we were poorly prepared for an orchestrated campaign of public violence, destruction, and sabotage of this nature,” he said, citing his address on July 16 2021 where he explained his government’s unpreparedness at the time of the unrest.
“While we commend the brave actions of our security forces on the ground, we must admit that we did not have the capabilities and plans in place to respond swiftly and decisively.”
A wave of civil unrest between July 9 and 18, sparked by the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt of court, engulfed KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, leading to the deaths of more than 300 people.
The violence also saw tremendous economic losses running into over R50-billion and eroded the economic growth recorded in the first half of 2021, said Finance Minister Enoch Godogwana during his maiden Budget speech in February.
The finance minister said the re-emergence of load-shedding, restrictions to deal with the third wave of Covid-19, and the strike in the manufacturing sector also slowed down South Africa’s economic recovery.
The Presidency said in a statement on Thursday: “Our economic recovery has been uneven and risks remain high. We must proceed with caution. In the 2021 MTBPS [medium-term budget policy statement], we committed ourselves to charting a course towards growth and fiscal sustainability.
“The commission [SA Human Rights Commission] launched the investigative hearings to exercise its constitutional and statutory mandate in relation to the causes of the unrest, as well as the impact of the unrest on human rights.”
Ramaphosa told the hearing that what the country experienced was not a popular uprising of the poor, as the peddlers of misinformation sought to characterise it at the time. “It was not the bubbling over of discontent over an allegedly legitimate political grievance. It was an attempted insurrection.”
He said the way the economic infrastructure was targeted entailed that the perpetrators’ intention was to bring the economy to “its knees” and to destabilise the democracy “we spent 28 years building”.
“Regardless of their intent, it was a situation for which we were not prepared. While there had been intelligence reports about the possibility of instability, neither the security services nor the government more broadly anticipated the nature, extent or ferocity of those events.
“This was a failing that we acknowledge, and which we are hard at work to address.”
Also read: Ramaphosa to testify at SAHRC hearings on July 2021 unrest
SAHRC commences hearings into July unrest
July unrest hit local economy hard
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