South Africa: Zuma Riots Violence: Update – & Who was behind it?

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The Zuma riot violence is dying down. There were 10 looting incidents today, and 3 incidents of arson. But that was for the whole of the country. It is thus down by 90% from Monday, when it was at its peak.

It turns out the Police/Government believe 12 key high ranking people were behind it. One of them has handed himself in to the cops. He was a Black man who was a former Ambassador to Japan. I looked at some film footage where a journalist asked him some questions. He was basically quite a wise-ass talking various nonsense and trying to direct things away from him.

I don’t think there will be any starvation in Durban. People in Natal may have been short of food, but nobody will die. It might be that we won’t see any shortages in Johannesburg.

I went and did my weekly grocery shopping on Thursday and was a bit shocked to see some shelves totally empty. So I went back on Friday to buy a bit more extra food and also to see how bad the shelves were now. To my utter surprise all the shelves were FULLY STOCKED!

So it appears the reason that the shelves were empty on Thursday was that most Blacks had been in their townships all week, until Thursday. And so they only came to the suburbs and businesses near where I live on Thursday, and it was they who emptied out the sections of the store that deal with the staple foods for Blacks, like maize (corn).

So when I went back on Friday, the store was totally full to the brim with food.

I think the majority of Whites and Blacks do not keep stocks of food, and so long queues of Whites in Natal also existed as people were hunting for food almost a week after the violence began.

The main violence is subsiding. But the question is, whether other things will come, like future low intensity stuff like assassinations, etc. I’ll discuss this separately.

jlamprecht