Three reason of looting shops and malls in Gauteng and Kwa Zulu Natal
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Answer:
The looting of businesses, shopping centres and warehouses in South Africa over the past week, particularly in the KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces, has taken place at an unprecedented scale. It has affected both poor and middle-class areas. Private as well as government property has been damaged and destroyed. People have been injured and lives have been lost.
A variety of narratives have emerged in an effort to explain the looting frenzy. Some have accused die-hard supporters of former president Jacob Zuma of fuelling the unrest. Others have intimated that the looting is a consequence of state capture and the high level of criminality in South Africa.
There have been suggestions that the current disorder is akin to a rebellion of the poor brought about by acute food insecurity.
Research findings on looting, nonetheless, suggest that such phenomena are rarely caused by one thing. Rather, it’s often the outcome of various factors.
Looting in South Africa has taken place intermittently for decades in the context of an ongoing crisis of poverty, inequality and unemployment. It occurred under apartheid and continued to take place after democracy 1994. But it has traditionally been largely confined to marginalised urban and peri-urban areas.
Incidents of looting have often been synonymous with outbreaks of xenophobic violence and service delivery protests. These have overwhelmingly happened in townships and informal settlements in which shops and businesses owned by foreign nationals have been plundered.
A study on xenophobic violence and the spaza shop sector by myself and researchers from the Safety and Violence Initiative showed that looting was often a highly localised phenomenon. That is, foreign-owned spaza shops (small, informal retail outlets) were vulnerable to looting in communities where a combination of factors were at play. Among them were intense xenophobic attitudes, ineffective measures to regulate competition among shop owners, dysfunctional community leadership and the alienation of foreign shop owners.
We noted in our study the uncomfortable reality that a key driver of looting was that it was perceived by the looters to be socially acceptable. And it was often encouraged and endorsed within social and community networks.
Our findings echo those in a number of publications on looting in the US and England.
However, as underscored in our report, looting does not spontaneously emerge. It usually comes about due to instigation by influential individuals or groups who actively articulate that looting against specific targets is permissible and justifiable.