The ANC's failure to build a properly functioning state and to deliver economic growth created the potential for chaos. The effects of the destruction will be felt for years
Elsewhere a humanitarian crisis was spreading. Queues for food snaked for ever. The main motorway into the city was closed after dozens of lorries were set alight. The country’s largest factory making anti-retroviral drugs was up in smoke. Vital supplies of bread, pills and nappies had to be flown in from Johannesburg. The city that hosts one of Africa’s busiest ports looked like the site of a natural disaster.
Peering at South Africa’s statistics verges on voyeurism. The unemployment rate, 33% in the first quarter of 2021, is the highest on record, perhaps the highest in the world. And it excludes those who have given up looking. Nearly half of black South Africans cannot find work or have stopped trying. Roughly 13m South Africans were hungry even before covid-19’s third wave, according to a survey.
As so often, ordinary South Africans filled the gap left by the state. At night in the suburbs of Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and in smallertowns, pallets, branches and barbed wire were shoved into street entrances as barricades. Residents, some armed, took turns to stand guard overnight. For most of the 20th century South Africa was a white-supremacist state. The creation of modern South Africa in 1910 established peace between Afrikaners and British settlers at the expense of black people. The brutality of apartheid, introduced in 1948, built on colonial foundations. Under the National Party whites benefited from state largesse while non-whites were violently displaced and exploited. By the late 1980s white rule was morally and literally bankrupt.
At its heart was Mr Zuma. Under him much of the progress was squandered. Corruption soared. The lure of jobs in the party led to scores of assassinations, most of them in, where Mr Zuma’s fellow Zulus predominate. Agencies meant to stop crime ran smear campaigns on political enemies. Government came to resemble an organised-crime gang.
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