PODCAST | Is Sri Lanka a warning to the ANC?

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A year since the July 2021 unrest in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, there is still no clear factual account of what happened.

As covered in the Sunday Times last weekend, many individuals and families are living lives irreparably damaged by the riots, quite apart from the incalculable economic consequences for the country that resulted from the unrest.

Sunday Times chronicled several accounts of how individual lives had been directly and permanently altered, from an aspiring young football talent who lost a leg, and another who was paralysed after being shot in the spine, to a mom who had to wait for many hours overnight with the body of her dead child before the body, with a bullet hole in the forehead, was removed.

In this edition of Eusebius on TimesLIVE, Sunday Times investigative reporters Thanduxolo Jika and Sabelo Skiti joined the podcast host to take stock of the events that shocked the nation and the international community a year ago.

Some of the issues framed by TimesLIVE contributor and analyst Eusebius McKaiser, and discussed with the two senior investigative journalists, include: why do we still not know all of the facts? What factors within the justice cluster account for why there has been no justice for survivors and victims of the riots? Have the effects of state capture on policing begun to be dealt with as yet?

What, too, of the popular uprising in Sri Lanka? Might similar scenes play out here, as a renewed iteration of the July 2021 riots, or are there salient dissimilarities between SA and Sri Lanka? Should the ANC learn lessons from places like Sri Lanka, where citizens protested in part because of an unbearable cost of living crisis? 

To listen to previous episodes, go here.

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