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<\/a><\/p>\nOn Monday, gunshots and circling helicopters could be heard in Chatsworth on the outskirts of Durban, and residents called for barricades to be set up to prevent their properties from being looted.<\/p>\n
More than 200 shopping malls had been looted by mid-Monday afternoon and retailers had lost an estimated R2 billion, according to Mavuso.<\/p>\n
Ramaphosa appealed for calm in a televised address on Monday night, his second in two days, and warned that the riots posed a severe threat to food security and were disrupting efforts to inoculate people against the virus that causes Covid-19.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we are witnessing now are opportunistic acts of criminality, with groups of people instigating chaos merely as a cover for looting and theft,\u201d he said. \u201cThe poor and the marginalized will bear the ultimate brunt of the destruction that\u2019s currently underway.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rand weakens<\/strong><\/p>\n The rand weakened as much as 2% to R14.50 the dollar on Monday, the most since Feb. 25.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are deeply concerned about the riots, violence and risk to people and property,\u201d said Martin Kingston, vice president of the country\u2019s biggest business group, Business Unity South Africa. \u201cBusiness confidence is severely undermined as a consequence of these developments.\u201d<\/p>\n The riots have been fueled by years of poor government service provision, an unemployment rate that\u2019s climbed to a record 32.6% and severe inequality that\u2019s been seized upon by populist politicians.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are facing the consequences of 15 years of decline in state capacity, efficacy and efficiency,\u201d said Claude Baissac, the head of Eunomix Business and Economics Ltd., which advises on political risk. \u201cThis is tinder for social explosion.\u201d<\/p>\n Difficult decisions<\/strong><\/p>\n Ramaphosa had difficult decisions to make. To bolster investor confidence and protect the economy, he needs to demonstrate a robust response as evidenced by his deployment of the army. But a crackdown could further fuel unrest, especially among those sympathetic to Zuma and his allies.<\/p>\n Already he may have erred.<\/p>\n Ramaphosa has twice said some of these acts of violence are based on \u201cethnic mobilization.\u201d Zuma has in the past played on the fact that he is a Zulu, the biggest ethnic group in South Africa, with his supporters at times wearing \u201c100% Zuluboy\u201d T-shirts.<\/p>\n The ANC has had a complicated relationship with the Zulu people. Prior to the end of apartheid, supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party, a Zulu nationalist party, fought bloody battles with ANC supporters in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.<\/p>\n \u201cI would be very careful in South Africa before you characterize along those lines,\u201d Ralph Mathekga, a political analyst and author of books about South African politics, said in reference to Ramaphosa\u2019s comments. \u201cI would be very cautious in legitimizing some sort of ethnic cleavage.\u201d<\/p>\n
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