Duduzane Zuma, the son of jailed former South African President Jacob Zuma, pleaded Wednesday with rioters and looters currently ransacking two provinces to behave “responsibly” as they went about their mayhem.
South Africa’s Independent Online reports:
Following the events in the aftermath of former president Jacob Zuma’s arrest, his son Duduzane has appeared in a video in which he says: “the people that are protesting and looting, please do so carefully and please do so responsibly”.
Zuma also blamed his father’s arrest and imprisonment and the government’s lockdown on the unfolding civil unrest in the country.
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He said that those who have been looting had been labelled “looters”, “criminals”, “hooligans”, and that this was a problem as it further fanned the flames because these were people who were desperate. He added that he was not condoning their behaviour of mass destruction.
“But we need to understand the root cause of these problems, and part of the problem is poverty, unemployment, inequality, and now leaving all the politics aside, let’s deal with the situation with reality in mind.
The video, posted on a friend’s Instagram, is below:
Zuma also said that people who were defending their property with weapons should also be understood, because “you cannot hold people responsible for defending what they love,” but that they should also do so “carefully” and “responsibly.”
He blamed poverty, his father’s imprisonment, ethnic hatred, and public frustration with coronavirus lockdowns for the chaos.
The violence and looting began last weekend, after the former president reported to prison for a 15-month term for contempt in a corruption investigation. Authorities have been unable to stop the violence in the Johannesburg and Durban region, in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal-Natal provinces, respectively.
On Tuesday, Durban — South Africa’s third-largest metropolitan area — ran out of bread and milk due to the looting.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.