President Cyril Ramaphosa’s testimony at the SA Human Rights Commission’s (SAHRC) hearings into the July 2021 riots has left me feeling afraid for our country. Instead of reassurance, his words have left me in despair.
It is clear now, coming from the highest office in the land, that our security establishment is clueless. The police and intelligence services have no idea what happened in that week of murder and chaos. It is unlikely anyone will be held responsible for it.
The president did not have a single fact to impart to the commission. He had theory and analysis in buckets, but the testimony was fact-free. That is scary. This is the man who is supposed to have all the facts at his fingertips. The cold, sobering truth is this: the president does not know what happened in July last year. He does not know because his security apparatus does not know.
Ramaphosa told the SAHRC that the riots came like “a bolt from the blue”. Well, it is now nine months since the violence. If the police and intelligence services had done their work properly and had anything meaningful to give him, his testimony would have added meat to what many commentators have already told us.
From what Ramaphosa said on Friday, this is clear: the chances of a recurrence are sky-high.
July 2021 was the biggest security threat to this country since 1994. Every single crime intelligence operative and detective should have been on the job trying to find the masterminds. Every spy should have been deployed and every piece of intelligence analysed. Nine months later, nothing has been dug up. As Ramaphosa said: “I guess you could say intelligence failure, security gathering failure ... much of what finally happened, we were not fully forewarned about it.”
The president himself dropped the ball. When the riots happened he had stopped calling meetings of his National Security Council (NSC) because he was dealing with Covid-19.
I hope I am proven wrong, but the truth is government has got nothing to bring to court. If there were a shred of evidence, a decent police service would have had something within a week or a month of those riots. There is nothing.
“Those meetings fell between the gaps,” he said. It is extraordinary that a government that deployed the army to enforce lockdown rules did not think Covid-19 was a security risk and that the NSC should therefore have continued to analyse threats. It’s extraordinarily shoddy.
Worse, however, is that when these mistakes and lapses have happened, we have zero capacity to investigate, process information, arrest, build a case and prosecute the perpetrators. What we have is opinion from the president.
Ramaphosa told the commission what any analyst could have told us last year: “The fundamental cause of the unrest was a deliberate decision by certain individuals to instigate, coordinate and incite widespread destruction of property, violence and looting.”
Who are these “certain individuals”? How did they instigate? Why have they not been charged with treason and brought before a judge?
I hope I am proven wrong, but the truth is government has got nothing to bring to court. If there were a shred of evidence, a decent police service would have had something within a week or a month of those riots. There is nothing.
Ramaphosa said he sent in the army after information came to light that national key points, oil refineries and energy plants were among intended targets. For such information to reach security agencies, informants close to the masterminds would have had to pass it on. Surely these informants have more on these masterminds? Where is the evidence they have been collecting so the police can arrest and convict the people behind the criminal mayhem that nearly destroyed SA? South Africans who lost relatives deserve to know who was behind their kin’s deaths, surely? Or do those more than 300 lives not matter?
We know the state security agencies were hollowed out during the Jacob Zuma years. The State Security Agency (SSA) became a cash machine for the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction of the ANC. The stories we heard from the Zondo Commission alone about what our spies were doing — from the comical interrogation of one of Zuma’s wives by a state security minister to the theft of billions of rand by cronies who could simply claim to be running safe houses or providing non-existent secret information — are hair-raising.
From the president’s testimony on Friday, these rotten potatoes are clearly still on the payroll and in charge of the security apparatus of this country. If, nine months after the riots, he could not provide a single new fact to what we already know, it means they are still not giving him a thing.
Ramaphosa’s testimony was a reminder that nothing has changed. Stay alert; keep yourself safe. The people who orchestrated last year’s riots are still at large and our government is clueless about who they are. Be afraid.
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