Eight Days in July: Inside the Zuma unrest that set South Africa alight

By Kaveel Singh

In July 2021, with Jacob Zuma's imprisonment, dramatic and violent scenes of unrest and looting unfolded in KZN and Gauteng. More than 340 people lost their lives, and the damage exceeded R50 billion. 
Piecing together the full story, journalists Qaanitah Hunter, Jeff Wicks and Kaveel Singh sifted through hundreds of pages of leaked documents and intelligence briefs.
Eight Days in July is a riveting first-hand account of what really happened, reported from the epicentre of the chaos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Oct 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9780624093077

Kaveel Singh

Kaveel Singh is a senior journalist and News24's KwaZulu-Natal correspondent. He is a seasoned newsman with twelve years of reporting on hard news, politics, features, investigations and writing the occasional column. He lives in Durban.

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EIGHT DAYS

IN JULY

Inside the Zuma unrest

that set South Africa alight

QAANITAH HUNTER

JEFF WICKS

KAVEEL SINGH

TAFELBERG

This book is dedicated to

everyone who suffered immeasurable harm

during the eight days in July.

‘… our country is harvesting the bitter fruits of a counterrevolutionary insurgency that has long been germinating in the bowels of what we commonly call state capture. The hallmarks of state capture – the deliberate and systematic denuding of state capacity that we have witnessed at SARS, SOEs, the weakening of all arms of law enforcement (including Intelligence Agencies and the NPA). The economic sabotage, wanton destruction of property and infrastructure we have witnessed cannot be accepted as incidental. We recall that the current situation was foreshadowed by open threats of civil war and unrest.’

– Thabo Mbeki, 16 July 2021

Foreword

Journalism is the ‘first rough draft of history’, the late president and publisher of The Washington Post, Philip Graham, famously wrote.

When former president Jacob Zuma left his Nkandla compound in a black bulletproofed vehicle shortly before midnight on 7 July 2021, to hand himself over to prison authorities at the Estcourt Correctional Centre, the News24 virtual newsroom was abuzz.

What we witnessed was historical. And we had a front-row seat.

For the first time since South Africa became a democracy in 1994, under the principled and fearless Nelson Mandela, an elected president was going to jail. This was momentous.

For years, the wily Zuma, ably assisted by a phalanx of lawyers and advocates, had avoided the inside of a courtroom and prison, even though he had been accused of corruption since at least 2003 when the Scorpions started investigating him for receiving arms deal bribes.

His famous corruption trial, which he managed to dodge for almost two decades, was finally about to start. And then he was jailed – for contempt of court.

Battered after a decade of state capture and rampant looting, Lady Justice finally made her appearance.

Nothing could prepare us for what would ensue in the following eight days.

Late in the afternoon on 8 July, after Zuma had spent his first night in prison, our intrepid investigative journalist Jeff Wicks posted a video on our WhatsApp group of a truck blocking the Tongaat Toll Plaza, north of Durban.

This signalled the start of a calamity that would resemble the scene of a war in the following days.

The violence and destruction spread like a wildfire – from Tongaat and Nkandla, to Mooi River, right up to Hillbrow and back to Durban and the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal. What started as a relatively small riot protesting Zuma’s incarceration rapidly turned into an orgy of violence and plundering as thousands of desperate South Africans joined in to grab what they could from violated shopping malls and warehouses.

What started as #ZumaUnrest quickly turned into #UnrestSA as Zuma’s supporters and agents provocateurs took advantage of the powder keg that large parts of South Africa had become, ravaged by structural poverty, unemployment and an economy crippled by COVID-19.

KwaZulu-Natal was always going to be the epicentre of the riots following Zuma’s incarceration. Although the former president had been largely discredited in the rest of South Africa – his indiscretions were laid bare in minute detail for over two years at the Zondo Commission into state capture – he maintained a loyal support base in KwaZulu-Natal, much of it steeped in Zulu tribalism.

We started receiving reports of organised violence, particularly in the smaller towns of northern and southern KwaZulu-Natal, and in the townships around Durban. When our KwaZulu-Natal journalist Kaveel Singh went up in a helicopter to assess the damage, he confirmed what we had heard; 4x4s filled with tyres were dropping them at various spots in Durban, setting them alight and speeding off.

Kaveel was at the forefront of covering the carnage in Durban, his hometown. On day three of the riots, it became impossible to send a backup team into KwaZulu-Natal. The highways were closed, and car rental companies had shut their shops at King Shaka airport.

KwaZulu-Natal ran out of petrol and food. Our news editors, in close contact with Kaveel, had to carefully plan his days so that he didn’t run out of petrol to move around. At one point, Kaveel ran out of food and was depending on his angel neighbour for a hot meal.

In the midst of the chaos, Kaveel heard that the Makro in Springfield, Durban, was under attack and I asked him to go there. He was accosted by a group of six men, armed with knives, who threatened to ‘stab you, beat you and cut your face’. No police officers or soldiers were anywhere to be seen.

Kaveel wrote on WhatsApp that he was under attack. Then he went quiet. It was the longest five minutes of my life. Miraculously he managed to escape the scene and speed off.

Law and order had completely broken down and I realised that our reporters were now on their own. We urgently had to order more bulletproof vests and reflector jackets. This was a war zone.

In Johannesburg, Jeff was told by a looter that he ‘hated white people and hoped [Jeff] dies’. Our journalist Sesona Ngqakamba was nearly hit by a rubber bullet as he navigated the streets of Hillbrow.

In Vosloorus, on the East Rand, our journalist Ntwaagae Seleka witnessed taxi drivers firing live ammunition at looters and accompanied police as they discovered more dead bodies in the wake of the destruction.

Very few of us became journalists to cover war. I was in primary school when political violence engulfed KwaZulu-Natal before the 1994 election. Political editor Qaanitah Hunter was not yet born when Zuma famously played a pivotal peacemaker role in bringing the brutal violence between the IFP and the ANC to an end.

But these were different times. Zuma and his supporters had finally brought their machine guns to the streets and shot open a tinderbox. The scenes were ugly. More than 340 people, including children, lost their lives.

Qaanitah, who had the best sources in the game, started putting together the pieces of the insurrection puzzle. Although the eight days in July quickly escalated into an unlawful free-for-all, it was clearly organised and instigated.

But who were the masterminds, and why weren’t they being rounded up by the police? Or were the police – or at least part of them – complicit in the chaos that turned our country upside down?

This book answers many of the questions we couldn’t in real time. It is a masterful rough draft of a history that will determine the course of our brittle democracy.

Adriaan Basson

Editor-in-chief of News24

Cape Town

Introduction

July 2021 will be recorded in the annals of South Africa’s history as a month blighted by unrest, violence and death. During a harrowing eight days, which followed the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma, the country’s fragile constitutional order was imperilled as never before.

In the post-democracy dispensation, Zuma has been a raging tempest, a man willing to place his interests – and the network of corruption and patronage he designed – above those of the people he swore an oath to serve. Thanks to an iron grip on law enforcement agencies and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), Zuma and his allies wielded a shield of impunity throughout his nine-year-long reign. The president laughed and chuckled in the face of Parliament, another institution with the power to hold him accountable. After nearly nine years in power, he seemingly believed himself to be untouchable, beyond the reach of the law.

His scorn for any form of accountability continued after his presidency. He thumbed his nose at Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo and the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture Zondo led, refusing to answer a raft of allegations that fingered him as the chief architect of a captured state. Through his Jacob Zuma Foundation, he attacked the Constitutional Court and the judiciary at large.

Following his refusal to appear before Zondo, Zuma was found to be in contempt of court and handed a fifteen-month prison sentence. He was given a week to hand himself in, but in another show of defiance he remained holed up in his sprawling Nkandla villa, secure in comfort as the deadline approached. His most vociferous supporters threatened war if Zuma was arrested and they vowed to lay down their lives to protect him.

But on 8 July, accountability finally caught up with Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma. Hundreds of policemen surrounded his Nkandla homestead, ready to storm the gates and haul him off to jail if necessary. With only minutes to spare, the 79-year-old surrendered, ending the tense standoff outside.

Zuma’s imprisonment was historic. The shield of impunity that had protected him for so long had melted away. He was no longer the commander-in-chief of the country’s armed forces. He no longer chaired Cabinet meetings and dismissed ministers at will. The country’s air force was no longer his personal shuttle service, with military helicopters chauffeuring him to and from Nkandla at his whim.

He was just a man who had broken the law – and the bill had finally come due.

Though violence had been averted at Nkandla, Zuma’s supporters and allies were seething. Within hours of his internment at the Estcourt Correctional Centre set in the rural heartland of KwaZulu-Natal, the first signs of the chaos that would be wrought in his name – over eight days in July – were beginning to reveal themselves.

Roads were strategically closed, part of a campaign to force the shutdown of KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma’s home province and his traditional stronghold. His backers demanded his immediate release and the resignation of the current executive, and vowed that if their ultimatum was ignored they would see to it that the country was plunged into crisis. Spurred on by Zuma’s children and their army of social media followers, rogue Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) operatives, Radical Economic Transformation (RET) forces and mafia-esque trucking and business forums whipped up support, and set in motion their campaign of economic sabotage. The political protest quickly gave way to an orgy of violence and looting which engulfed two provinces. Thousands of shops, businesses and malls were simultaneously attacked and vandalised in what President Cyril Ramaphosa later labelled a failed insurrection.

With the police overrun, the military was deployed to restore order, as a factional battle within the ANC spilled onto the streets. When the cost was counted, over 340 people were dead, R50 billion had been cleaved off the ailing economy and more than 150 000 were left jobless and pushed below the breadline.

This book is the culmination of hours of fieldwork and reporting from within the thick of the unrest. We saw first-hand how a beleaguered and vastly outnumbered police force clashed with huge crowds of looters. As bullets flew overhead, we waded in among the throngs and witnessed the depravity of man as rioters trampled over dead bodies as they pillaged. We reported as buildings burnt and from shopping malls left decimated by the crime spree. We delved into the militia squads that patrolled neighbourhoods and protected property, and saw how a sense of duty was, in some cases, maliciously distorted into racial profiling, which led to the murder of innocent black people. We watched the rout of the country’s police at the hands of a well-organised foe. Collectively, our dispatches from the frontlines tell the stories of pain, suffering and loss.

In piecing together the minutiae of the eight days of bedlam, we sifted through hundreds of pages of leaked documents, intelligence briefs and estimates. They provide a chronicle of what spy agencies knew and when, as the chaos spread. The trove of reports took us inside National Intelligence Coordinating Committee (Nicoc) meetings – the body tasked with marshalling South Africa’s intelligence-gathering structures – revealing what the combined network of spies spread across the State Security Agency (SSA), the Defence Intelligence Division (DI) and the police’s Crime Intelligence Division (CI) had gathered from their informers and sources. The dossier we compiled shows the intel handed over to the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure (NatJOINTS), through which the response to the pandemonium was planned. We verified and compared documents from deep inside the Security Cluster, the murky realm of the police’s CI, and those before Parliament in decoding how the country was pushed to the brink of disaster.

The repository of evidence exposes a string of missteps within the country’s Security Cluster, with the early warnings of intelligence agencies – two months before the unrest erupted – ignored or cast aside. ‘Political tension that degenerates into the mobilisation of grassroots and pressure groups’ reaction to unfolding developments are set to have a negative effect on stability and governance nationally and provincially,’ read one of the warnings – on 11 May 2021.

Intelligence reports like these are typically included in briefing materials submitted to the presidency. In this case, we could not establish beyond doubt that the warning crossed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s desk or that he himself read it. But what is not at issue is that people in the highest echelons of government were aware of it.

Warnings issued much later – when KwaZulu-Natal was already burning – cautioned that the violence could inspire ‘copy-cat tactics’ in other provinces and could fuel ‘conflict along racial lines’. Both predictions came chillingly true.

The intelligence documents also reveal that ANC branch structures might have been hijacked to help instigate the violence and that the country could have suffered even greater damage. Plans were afoot to target the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the Vaal Dam, among others.

As the violence raged, the intelligence agencies feared that Zondo himself could come under threat, resulting in security around the Deputy Chief Justice being beefed up.

In our examination it became clear that, while the intelligence trio of the SSA, DI and CI had a vague view of the genesis of the unrest, the modus operandi of instigators and their high-profile targets, this was never properly utilised. The result was a country set ablaze.

This is the story behind one of the darkest periods in our history, as the thin veneer of the rainbow nation was stripped away to reveal its ugly side: racism, xenophobia, poverty and violence. This is the story of eight days in July.

Chapter 1

‘No real choice’: Zuma sentenced to jail

Jacob Zuma has played cat and mouse with law enforcement for almost two decades. He has flirted with the prospects of jail in his rampant disregard of the law, aided by his chronic sense of victimhood, borne of sinister plots by his enemies. He has dared law enforcement to come after him, while knowing full well all he has done to capture, collapse and corrupt the criminal justice system from within.

During his presidency, Zuma engineered the hollowing out of every significant organ of the state which could ensure accountability – with the complicity of the ruling ANC. He gelded Parliament, a vital constitutional watchdog, and kneecapped the South African Revenue Service (SARS) when it began to threaten powerful interests. The police, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and the SSA were all commandeered to serve the factional interests of the party and that of ‘uBaba’, a man intent on enriching himself at whatever cost. His toxic circle of influence gradually infiltrated every nook and cranny of government. When an investigation found that public funds were misused to enlarge and renovate his rural Nkandla homestead to the tune of more than R264 million, loyalists installed in key positions of authority rallied to his defence.

Perhaps the most odious betrayal of his oath of office was the tacit transfer of his authority as president to the Gupta brothers, as he became the single most important enabler of a network of state capture which saw billions stolen from the public purse. This vast and shadowy criminal network decimated the state. The lives and careers of any minister or civil servant who dared stand up to Zuma and his coterie were destroyed. Brave men and women who could not abide the hijacking of state institutions were mercilessly hounded out, often under the cloud of a contrived scandal. The Union Buildings and the authority of the state were sold off to the highest bidder.

When he was president, he often joked to his supporters about how unafraid he was of jail. ‘I’ve been there before,’ he would say of his ten years on Robben Island as a political prisoner.

At the centre of Zuma’s legal woes is the visceral belief that he was somehow exempt from the law. This was on full display at the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, headed by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo. The commission was set up to probe the extent to which Zuma and those he empowered captured the state for their personal benefit. Zondo had been tasked with drawing back the veil and revealing the nexus of organised crime that saw the plundering of state coffers to the tune of billions, aided by the sitting head of state and his cronies.

Zuma has long disputed the mere existence of state capture, often saying that if the state was captured, it would mean that all