The unrest that gripped KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng was “quite clearly instigated”.
“All of these incidents of unrest and looting were
instigated. There were people, who instigated it. Police have a line of sight
of what was happening. We are after those people. We have identified some of
them,” President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Friday.
However, he admitted that “we don’t know what their full
intentions are”.
Ramaphosa landed on Friday morning in Durban, which has
been ravaged by violent protests, vandalism and looting this week. However, he
will not be visiting areas, such as the suburb of Phoenix, and the provincial
capital, Pietermaritzburg, that have been most affected.
Ramaphosa conceded that government and security agencies
could have done better.
“We were overwhelmed by the situation ... we did not want
to get in a situation that could have resulted in more mayhem.”
He applauded ordinary citizens for defending the assault on
the country's democracy.
“Ordinary citizens have felt they need to defend their
areas and their assets. And we welcome that ordinary citizens are working with
police to defend [not just] their own assets but our democracy. This is an
assault on our democracy. The instigators want to spread instability.”
Ramaphosa said he did not regret initially linking ethnic
mobilisation to the unrest, because communication, including voicemails, showed
that the “instigators” had been using ethnic terms to mobilise.
“It is not about ethnic mobilisation. It's about many
causes and we will talk about that later,” he said.
TimesLIVE
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