SA Bloggers Make BBC News on Xenophobia, but it's really looting, perhaps the start of a revolution, and a growing trend worldwide

What do South Africans think about what is happening in their country? One of the best ways to assess public sentiment on a large unfolding event is simply to look at what ordinary folk are saying on their blogs. This happened during the UFS racist videos, and now with the world's eyes on SA's Xenophobia, people want to know what is going on in ordinary South African's hearts and minds.

While a reporter can go to the trouble to visit the country with a camera and document what is happening, blogs are already there, embedded, reporting for free - free to air. It's already written, with opinions, concerns and insights freely offered, sometimes even accompanied by photos (and if you're lucky, video), and best of all, it's searchable. What more could you want?

BBC article: SA bloggers want end to violence

Well, having looked at the article it comes across touchy feely. Because the correct assessment (and even the news media fail to see this) is that the cause of the xenophobia/violence is the sudden onset of worsening prospects for the poor. Xenophobia itself is just a symptom of the underlying cause - the increasing fury and frustrations of the poor, which is clearly linked to South Africa's worsening economic prospects. And the implications are obvious and dire: with fuel prices increasing the xenophobia/violence will increase in lock-step with these pressures, meaning, it is going to spread. And it is spreading. Blaming is going to become the new hobby for hordes of people, but really, the high energy prices are a fact of life, and casting blame is really beside the point. It's reality.

This article, by Chris Moerdyk, is excellent: South Africa: Communications Chaos Over Xenophobia Crisis although Moerdyk also seems convinced that the cause is racist xenophobia, with no underlying driving force: The worst was a provincial MEC for safety and security, whose name I cannot remember but who wore a garish, shiny suit and pork-pie hat and calmly stood in the chaos and bodies with a smile on his face, claiming that there was nothing xenophobic about all the bloodshed. Obviously there is xenophobia involved, but as I say, it's merely an instrument to activate the poor and get them out there looting. We've already seen South Africans become targets, and unfortunately, that may well continue. What is the word for have-nots attacking haves? Looting? Revolution? Think that's far fetched?

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said the violence reflected growing global tensions.

"The underlying factor is basically poverty," he said. "We are witnessing an increase in the number and intensity of crisis that generate displacement around the world. We are very worried."

More News Analysis: What is behind xenophobia in S. Africa

Crisis Deepens and Spreads: Xenophobia Violence Mobs Johannesburg

Deaths have doubled in a day from 22 to 42, with displaced refugees trippling from around 10 000 to 28 533. 400 people have been arrested so far. Many immigrants, especially Mozambicans, have elected to return home, while other groups have begun moving to border control areas. South Africa has mobilised its army to deal with the spreading crisis.

Mbeki calls in military as SAfrica mob deaths double

South African President Thabo Mbeki called in troops Wednesday to halt attacks on foreigners as the death toll nearly doubled and violence began spreading across the country.
In northeastern Mpumalanga, police said businesses owned by foreigners had been looted overnight in the Leslie and Embalenhle townships.

"They looted six tuck shops and burnt three. Some belonged to Zimbabweans and some to Somalis," a police officer told the SAPA news agency from the scene of the attacks.

The foreigners, most of whom have fled the economic meltdown in neighbouring Zimbabwe, have been blamed for the sky-high rates of crime in South Africa as well as for depriving locals of jobs.

The unofficial unemployment rate in South Africa is believed to be about 40 percent.

Meanwhile the damage to the country's reputation from the violence -- reminiscent of that seen in townships during the whites-only apartheid era -- was highlighted as the rand currency dropped against the dollar and the euro.

Rainbow nation goes up in flames

Horror in Johannesburg: Beatings, Man set alight, Mobs Run Riot, 22 dead

The front pages of three major South African newspapers today featured a burning man. A photographer on the scene in Reiger Park, Johannesburg, Halden Krog, said concrete slabs around the man were splattered with blood. The mob beat him then covered him in blankets and set him alight.

While police officers scrambled to help him, kicking sand onto him and finally spraying out the flames with an extinguisher, all the smoking and badly singed man could do was groan softly. Krog says that police assisted the man until paramedics arrived, and while they waited, residents gathered and laughed. Another photographer on the scene admonished them, but the crowd continued to laugh. The man died in hospital later in the evening.

Harrowing photographs show a man covered in flames, in some cases flames near his hands and curling up his face, but he appears too weak or shocked to do anything. These pictures are eerily reminiscent of troubling times not so long ago when vicious necklance murders were the order of the day in South Africa (large tyres were placed over the individual and set alight).

Controversy has erupted over the 'burning man pictures', with some South Africans decrying them as 'bad publicity' ahead of the Soccer World Cup in 2010.

A country overrun by crime

The death toll has now reached 22, with hundreds of arrests made, and an additional deployment of an 'Intervention Force' of some 150 police. With numerous rampaging mobs numbering over 500, some have argued that police reaction has been too limited and called for military assistance, while others have cautioned against 'militarising society'. The police insist it is not xenophobia but 'pure criminality' as violence is associated with theft and large scale looting and house robberies.

Under-reaction

Medecins Sans Frontieres has called the situation a 'humanitarian crisis', while South Africa's president has typically under-reacted, saying a panel would be set up to investigate the attacks. Has the president visited any of the scenes, or offered any form of relief or incentive or plan to control the violence? His best offer has been an intellectual response - merely to seek to understand...

Two very important messages are conveyed through these recent events, and while they have been obvious for some time, they bear our urgent attention now.

1) President Thabo Mbeki's general lack of leadership, influence and involvement has cost South Africans dearly, both directly through his consistent failures on everything from AIDS to crime, and indirectly in terms of his virtual endorsement of Mugabe.

Mbeki's weak policies have failed consistently to address the obvious and chronic crisis in Zimbabwe, which has amounted to a protracted divorce from reality. The consequences of these leadership failures are now erupting and burning in the engine of Africa's streets.

2) South Africa is not a safe country. Not for foreigners, and not for its own citizens. 50 murders are committed daily with rapes estimated at 150 a day or one every 10 minutes, and almost half of these are against children under 12 years of age. In Meadowlands, Soweto, 90% of rapes are said to be perpetrated against children under 12 years.

Should South Africa be rewarded for failing to address the criminal crime situation that was already obvious when South Africa won the FIFA World Cup bid? Should South Africa be rewarded for stubbornly dismantling an elite crime fighting unit (in the last few months) and constantly underplaying the urgent measures required to address crime? It is as a result of this lazy laissez-faire leadership that South Africa remains the most violently criminal nation in the world.

You can fool some people some of the time

While politically correct South Africans try to congratulate themselves that they are not racists, it is evident that racism, violence and unacceptable levels of corruption and dishonesty have infected large pockets of the population. Pretence and connivery is obvious in leadership positions in government (South Africa's Health Minister is a recent example) and also in many business and service sectors.

Ordinary blacks and whites, as citizens and voters, have failed to function as conscious and socially committed agents of change. And ordinary citizens have not made their leaders accountable for a lack of real results, or even for their transgressions and so become culpable in the moral demise of their own country.

Publicity scam

Playing publicity games ought to be over for South Africa. It is time that the country seriously addresses its many serious problems, both in terms of its leaders, its communities and at the level of each and every citizen becoming involved in the fate of the nation.

While South Africa fails to take care of its own, those who solicit business should not be rewarded economically, investments ought to be steered away from business and diverted to the poor until business and government begin to address the serious domestic issues that they are faced with. Let's be sensible and practical: the World Cup ought to be held elsewhere. The incentives of the World Cup were apparently not enough to bring about sufficiently real change, and this is both abundantly evident and utterly deplorable.

Violence in Johannesburg Spreads like Wildfire Virus

On the 7pm SABC news bulletin, violence hotspots were superimposed over a map of Gauteng. Markers included Alexandra, Dieplsoot, Olifantsfontein, Tembisa, Thokoza, Jeppestown, Cleveland, Honeydew, Johannesburg Inner City, Sowetan and half a dozen other areas.

While the Media and even 'intelligence experts' remain dumbfounded why 'apparently random' attacks have happened, what is already immediately clear and obvious is the following:

1) the attacks are conducted in large groups
2) the attacks are associated with a high level of robbery which is in fact organised looting
3) the attacks are not mere xenophobia since there are many reports of South African citizens being attacked, but xenophobia is an element rationalising the crowd mindset behind these violent activities.
4) All of the attacks have occurred in poor areas
5) The attacks are spreading rapidly around Johannesburg

In order to provide an explanation, it is not necessary to open up a special investigation or to refer this matter to experts. The explanation for the spread of violence is incontrovertible:

1) Timing. In recent weeks South Africa has seen large increases in the prices of fuel and basic food prices, and even services such as electricity. At the same time South Africans of all income groups have a perception of a breakdown in services, including crime, electricity, health etc, which induces a heightened sense of hopelessness in poor populations in particular. Higher interest rates and other associated costs has had a sudden and immediate impact on primarily the poor, quickly rendering large groups of unemployed groups incapable of meeting certain long established levels of subsistence.
2) The ongoing instability across the border has engendered a mindset of unease and perceived threat - since the Zimbabwe situation appears unlikely to be resolved soon, the perception is that competition over scarce resources (food, jobs and housing) by the poor is reinforced
3) The onset of winter increases the discomfort levels, and the perception of 'danger to survival', and some perceptions are associated with a widespread belief that houses have been corruptly offered to illegal aliens rather than those in squatter camps placed on a waiting list for countless months with no results in their favour. The reality of winter is starker if you have been waiting without success for a house, and seen houses being given away over one's own head, as it were, to foreigners. The result is an angry and in some ways desperate response.

It may be coincidental, but recent news indicating long term oil prices may also have filtered through, reinforcing again a hopeless and deplorable state of affairs. Whether the future prices of food or fuel and their impact on South Africa's economic losers have been accepted, realised or even understood is less important than knowing that the present Hooligan Revolution is likely to increase in severity over the longer term for exactly these reasons.

I personally believe beyond a certain critical level of civil strife in Gauteng, it will be generally unsafe and become necessary for middle class whites in suburbia to leave Johannesburg entirely. I would see places like Kroonstad (200km south) and Bloemfontein (400km south) as providing relative safety and security over the medium term. Even so, high food and fuel prices and their profoundly negative impact on the poor (estimated at around 50% of South Africa's population) may well lead to a revolutionary overthrow of current systems in place. As such, the government ought to initiate massive AID packages to poor communities nationwide at the earliest possible time.

A longer term initiative, assuming order is regained, ought to be an intensive farming program to activate and mobilise the poor into addressing the nation's food troubles directly.
Deadly clashes in Johannesburg
S.Africa anti-foreign violence spreads, many flee
Deadly Clashes In Johannesburg Kill At Least 7 People

NVDL: The above image to me is representative of both the African and South African condition. It has two bananas over a newspaper image of Xenophobia refugees sheltering in a police station. The police are ineffectual, the mother is exhausted and asleep, and the baby stares upward, aware that 'things are changed'. And they are. The bananas are in an initial state of decomposition, turning blacker - representing the dark future for food domestically, and the diminishing yellow light of hope in this country, but also everywhere else.

It's not Xenophobia, it's the beginning of SA's slide into anarchy

"I can't say this is xenophobia. This is a kind of organised crime by a mob of lazy people hiding behind xenophobia to loot and rob others' goods." - Solomon Abdi (from Somalia)

NVDL: All South Africans, whites in particular, ought to be concerned about this. Large mobs invading homes, and essentially committing mass robberies under the cover of chaos, and safety in numbers. Why is this happening now? Simple. Some basic commodities have just become unaffordable for a large group of people - things like bread, milk, meat and fruit. They have overnight turned into economic losers. Many of them. And this is the response. Except more of the same, and it will devastate poor communities and in time [mass violent crime/looting] will target suburbia in general.

Schalk Burger's sister may have a little bit of the psychology right, in deciding not to be a victim. But her response is actually completely irrational. It's once again a 'positivised ignorance' at the expense of a critical appraisal of the context (reality) that we live in. A rational response is to assuage how severe the crime situation has become, that we are starting to famous people more and more become victims of crime (at one end of the spectrum) and at the other end, mobs preying on the poor.

As with the fuel, I don't expect this to sink in until it is a foregone conclusion. South Africa is at the leading edge of what Peak Oil expert (we emailed each other today) James Kunstler calls, The Long Emergency. And South Africa will provide a vicious case study for the West for how a country in an energy crisis breaks down into anarchy, chaos and degradation.