The South African Communist Party (SACP) has distanced itself from unconfirmed reports of a possible national shutdown.
This comes amid posts circulating on social media alleging that a total shutdown would happen on Monday.
There was a similar campaign last month that led to widespread looting and vandalism in KwaZulu-Natal and parts of Gauteng which left over 350 people dead.
The SACP’s KZN Provincial Secretary Themba Mthembu says they do not condone a national lockdown.
“We don’t know who came out with this poster. We woke up the morning with this poster bearing our logo and it is calling for something which we are not associated with. So that is why we distance ourselves from it. We do not condone any action that happened in the past that was violent, the looting, which has brought devastation on our community of the working class.”
Meanwhile, it’s business as usual in large parts of Soweto on Monday.
The usually busy Bara taxi rank in Soweto is teeming with commuters boarding and getting off taxis. Packed busses can also be seen transporting passengers to their destinations.
Traffic is flowing smoothly along the Chris Hani and Nancefield roads, which are used as exit routes into and out of Soweto. Some of the shopping malls that were attacked and vandalised during last month’s civil unrest are not yet open.
Security guards are manning the entrances. There is no police visibility at the moment.
Law enforcement officers placed on high alert amid shutdown rumours
In a statement from the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, Major General Mathapelo Peters, says the renewed threats are not being taken lightly.
She says security forces are on high alert to maintain stability in the country.
“The Nat joints is aware of inflammatory messages on various social media platforms advocating for violence. Those behind these messages are warned that inciting violence is a criminal offence. Members of the public are cautioned against spreading such divisive messages. A different set of messages is also doing the rounds where people are mobilising to respond to the supposed shutdown. The public is urged not to respond to calls for violence and criminality and are thus discouraged from participating in activities that seek to defy the rule of law and to undermine the authority of the state.”
The Centre for Analytics and Behavioural Change at the University of Cape Town says they are again seeing calls for a shutdown and for violence from a sophisticated network of Twitter accounts promoting the ideas of radical economic transformation.
The centre’s Stuart Jones says several suspicious accounts were used to amplify the social media coverage, by retweeting it more than 100 000 times. He says at least 12 fake accounts were used to spread inciting messages like wildfire on social media.
“If we just stick to those 12 accounts, in a single month they authored over 100 000 tweets, and of these, 14 000 contained hashtags and keywords that we considered to be associated with incitement to violence. On average each of these accounts is posted 526 times a day. And the highest of these accounts posted 1 254 times a day hashtags associated with the incitement to violence in a single day on the 12th of July – which is on average a tweet every 43 seconds.”
