South Africa is in ferment in the immediate aftermath of its former President, Jacob Zuma’s arrest after surrendering to the authorities.
There have been violent protests and extensive looting, even as his lawyers try to convince the country’s highest court that it had erred in convicting the former anti-apartheid campaigner for contempt of court.
Last month, South Africa’s Constitutional Court sentenced the former President, who resigned in 2018 under pressure from his own African National Congress, to 15 months in prison after he refused to testify at a government-mandated commission investigating allegations of widespread corruption during his nine years in power.
He was arrested on Wednesday after failing to hand himself over to the police within the mandated three days. While the initial reaction to Zuma’s arrest was muted, protests grew in KwaZulu-Natal over the weekend before turning increasingly violent and spreading to Johannesburg last Sunday.
By Monday evening, at least 10 people had been killed, including a security guard, and police had arrested nearly 500 others.
“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,” President Cyril Ramaphosa, Mr Zuma’s successor, said in an address to the nation, reading out the names of those who had died in the unrest.
As television stations broadcast the President’s speech, some carried split screens showing the continuing looting outside.
The fury of the nationwide protests has unnerved the authorities.
Mr. Ramaphosa said he had authorized the deployment of soldiers to support the police and other law-enforcement agencies.
Authorities have struggled to contain the violence and enforce a ban on public gatherings amid a night curfew to slow a record wave of Covid-19 infections across the country which has overwhelmed hospitals and led to shortages of oxygen. South Africa exemplifies a hideous cocktail of a former President’s arrest and the fury of his supporters at a time it battles disease.
Well and truly has the country slid from the heady days of Nelson Mandela. President Ramaphosa said the violence threatened to disrupt South Africa’s Covid-19 vaccination drive, just as it is starting to gain momentum, and could lead to shortages in food and medicines if major transport routes continued to be cut off.
Zuma’s conviction after years of allegations of corruption and other wrongdoing was widely seen as a victory for Mr Ramaphosa, who has pledged to clean up South African politics and the ruling African National Congress.
The protests indicate not only the continued factional fighting within the ANC, but also the broader issues facing South African society, where the pandemic and lockdown have deepened poverty, joblessness and some of the world’s highest rates of inequality. “They just needed a little trigger,” said Susan Booysens, a political analyst and director of research at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection in South Africa.