© REUTERS/Rogan Ward
A military tank patrols near a shopping centre which was damaged after several days of looting following the imprisonment of former South Africa President Jacob Zuma in Durban, South Africa, July 16, 2021.
A South African cabinet minister has announced that the death toll from the looting and violence, triggered by the sentencing and arrest of former President Jacob Zuma, has risen to 212.
Speaking on Friday evening in a televised news conference, Acting Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said the country had now registered 212 deaths since the violence erupted.
Just a day earlier, Ntshavheni had said there had at that point been 117 deaths in the two provinces primarily affected by the unrest, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
The minister on Friday described the situation in KwaZulu-Natal, where the violence and unrest have been most persistent, as "stable" but "tense." She said the eastern province had seen an additional 89 deaths over the previous 24 hours.
Ntshavheni added that authorities in the region had reported
1,488 incidents of unrest, violence and looting in the past 24 hours. The government said there would be further investigations, after 4,000 rounds of ammunition were found on two people arrested.
In Gauteng, the province in which both the country's administrative capital and its largest city is located, the violence has been largely quelled. The minister said there had been an additional six deaths there during the past 24-hour period, and that 137 additional arrests had been made.
Comment: The slow creep of ideology into hard sciences will have few results other than significantly less intelligent students. At least there's one sane man in Canadian politics.
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