Shaken vendors in Orange Farm say criminals hijacked the service delivery protests there this week and organised schoolchildren to loot their spaza shops.
“We saw schoolkids rioting in the streets. They went about assaulting vendors at their stalls and taking their wares,” said Adam Hattia, a manager of the Sweet Shop in the Palm Springs Mall, which is in the township south of Johannesburg.
When the Mail & Guardian visited the shopping centre early on Wednesday morning, there were no vendors outside doing business and several police vehicles were parked nearby.
In the mall business was slow, Hattia told the M&G.
“We have rents and business to do and it hurts us when we shut down. There are not many people in the mall.” He and other shopowners had made plans to close up shop if “the police failed to control the crowd”. He said the protesters “have a just cause”. “But you don’t have to stone people — you can have peaceful protests.”
Several vendors who lost their belongings expressed their frustration. “They are right to protest about houses and roads, but why take wares from us?” asked Ferry Nkosi, who has a stall close to a busy intersection near the mall.
She said her stall had been ransacked and two bags of wares were missing. “I don’t know what else they took because they wanted to beat us, so we went to hide.”
Nkosi said the attackers came in groups. Some were driving Toyota Ventures into which they threw the stolen merchandise.
“It was unemployed youths who ganged up with schoolchildren from here,” said Louie Mthembu. “We can never know who did it. It’s hard to pinpoint. It’s a mixture, but mostly it’s schoolkids.”
Captain Johannes Motsiri, Orange Farm police station spokesperson, said 83 arrests had been made by midweek. Wednesday was relatively quiet, he said, though some protesters had tried to force their way into the mall.
He could not verify the vendors’ claims that schoolchildren had looted their stalls — they had not reported this to police, he said.
‘Perhaps it’s better we go back’
On Wednesday Somali businessman Abdi Tosuf Dirran was in the Orange Farm police station to report the looting of his shop by protesters when the Mail & Guardian met him.
He spoke little English and his cousin, Mustuf Yosuf Mahamed, had travelled from Johannesburg to help translate. Sporting a goatee, Dirran wore baggy pants and a Paul Smith shirt. He was mostly emotionless, breaking occasionally into a mirthless cackle.
This is the third time Dirran has been looted, his cousin said. “Government should do something about this,” Mahamed said, as we negotiated our way through the debris-strewn streets to Dirran’s shop.
The metal doors that once shielded his shop hung askew. We gently nudged the door and it swung open. Earlier this week shoppers had bought their groceries from this store, but now its grey floor was littered with paper.
There was a loaf of bread here and tea bags there — left behind by looters doing a hasty job. Fridges lay face down, metal cabinets were cleaned out. The only sign of life amid the mess was a black-and-white kitten that mewed and followed us around.
“They broke into the shop and took everything,” Dirran said, including 150 bags of mealie meal of 12.5kg each. He estimated the loss at more than R100 000.
Dirran ruled out xenophobia: “They didn’t target us; they just targeted our business. There are criminals who are taking advantage.” Later, as the M&G team stood outside the shop in the company of a group of commiserating South African women, two tough-looking young men went up the road, shooting sharp glances at us.
“Those are some of the people involved,” Dirran said.
“What do you think is the solution to this?” he asked and proceeded to answer his own question: “Perhaps it’s better we go back.”
Dirran’s despair must run deep if he’s tempted to return to his native Somalia — in the grip of a civil war and where there has been no peace since the overthrow of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991.