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‘Please loot responsibly’ – Jailed Jacob Zuma’s son urges father’s supporters (Video)

Published

3 years ago

July 15, 2021

Jacob Zuma’s son has urged looters to ‘do so responsibly’ and called for his father to be freed after South Africa’s lawlessness entered its sixth consecutive day amid fears of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ with food, fuel and Covid medicine shortages..

Please loot responsibly 😂 This one is definitely a Zuma pic.twitter.com/DBIzkuIMS2
— Jacob Zuma (@jacobzuma) July 14, 2021

The former president was locked up last Friday for failing to appear in court on corruption charges, prompting riots and looting across the country, with police forces totally absent or in some cases, officers participating..

Duduzane Zuma took to Instagram to call for his father to be freed and the Covid lockdown to end, claiming that with troops now deployed the country was ‘just one massacre away from a complete spiralling out of control.’

‘For the people that are protesting and looting, please do so carefully and please do so responsibly. Because you cannot hold people responsible for defending what they love,’ Zuma said.

The 37-year-old, who has his own ambitions to run the country, said that ‘finger pointing’ was not going to help because the government must ‘feed the poor people that are looting’ as he blamed lockdown-fuelled economic inequity for the chaos.

But the raging unrest has lost any sense of its loose political origins, descending into wanton lawlessness, including gang shoot-outs in the streets, people queuing up with cars to loot warehouses and malls, and wealthy Indian and white South Africans forced to take up arms to protect their homes.

A 13-year-old boy was shot dead at a mall outside Johannesburg on Wednesday during skirmishes between vigilante taxi drivers and looters.

And two police officers were caught on camera with their cars packed full of allegedly looted household supplies and even a flat-screen television.

Now President Cyril Ramaphosa has promised to call up more soldiers after deploying 2,500 troops to bolster overrun police forces in in Johannesburg and Durban. But rioting has also spread to Mpumalanga, Northern Cape and Soweto.