[imagesource: Johnny Miller / Millefoto]

This isn’t exactly breaking news.

However, it is worth revisiting how gross inequality and poverty have helped fuel some of the horrific scenes we have seen over the past week or so.

We’re not talking about the guys carting off flatscreen TVs, or ransacking a Woolies before hopping into a Merc, but rather about the sheer desperation that saw supermarkets emptied of food staples and the like.

In addition, we now know that the targeting of water treatment plants, cutting off of fuel supplies, disrupting food and medical supplies, and the like was part of “well-orchestrated economic sabotage” aimed at destabilising the country for political gain.

Via Global Citizen, some damning stats regarding that inequality:

South Africa is the most unequal country in the world, with the richest 20% of people controlling 70% of the country’s assets and resources, and the wealthiest 10% owning more than half the national income…

According to the 2020 The United Nations Human Development Report, one in five South Africans lives on less than R28 ($1.90) a day, and income inequality in the country is expected to worsen. More than 2 million people lost their jobs in 2020 as a result of the pandemic and the rate of inequality is only expected to intensify.

20% of the country lives on less than R28 a day – that is staggering.

Mervyn Abrahams, the director of KwaZulu Natal-based Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group, says that the recent looting and protests were also “driven by economic issues, not so much the political issue of freeing Jacob Zuma”:

He continued: “These protests are not even isolated to food but have provided a cover for people who feel excluded economically to just come and take over.”

Of course, the damage done during the looting will only deepen the unemployment crisis, but desperate times breed desperate measures.

Speaking to NPR over the weekend, Eusebius McKaiser further outlined why these levels of inequity in South African society can so rapidly lead to social unrest and violence:

We’ve got 74% of young people unemployed, not in educational institutions, nor in training facilities where they might get apprenticeships to learn new trades that they can use within the labor market…

Half the population is chronically poor, and we have economic growth that is almost near 0%. We had an economic recession even before the pandemic.

So the structural realities about South African life when it comes to the state of the economy are such that you’ve got a small number of people at the top who are wealthy, a precarious middle class of sorts, and then you’ve got a massive base of people on the margins of society. That, for me, is a very important part of the explanandum for what is going on in South Africa right now.

That’s exactly why it was so easy for these so-called “agitators” to sow the seeds of violence on social media.

None of this is to excuse what has happened, but rather to help understand the root causes.

In addition, South Africans see politicians looting and stealing on the grandest of scales without repercussion, and it breeds contempt for the rule of law.

At the end of the day, it was ordinary South Africans who kept us from a full-scale civil uprising, rather than our government.

It remains to be seen whether this talk of holding the behind-the-scenes forces accountable will ever play out, because empty words and platitudes are all we get from up top these days.

[sources:globalcitizen&npr]