ANC factional battles also fuelled the July 2021 violence, which overwhelmed the security forces, the report found. The unrest was the deadliest in South Africa’s democratic era.
The report into the handling of the riots by a government-appointed expert panel was made public by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday.
“There was a failure by the intelligence structures to anticipate and respond adequately to the violence,” it found.
The intelligence services “failed to predict the nature, scale and modus operandi” of the violence while the police had “insufficient capacity” to curb it, the report added.
The experts also said that the information they gathered suggested “that the internal differences within the governing party, the ANC, contributed to the unrest”.
The African National Congress is divided mainly between supporters of Ramaphosa and those of his predecessor Zuma, who was forced to resign over corruption in 2018.
The ANC had admitted that some of the people “inciting” the violence were their members, the report said, adding however that “it is unclear whether disciplinary action was taken against such members”.
In an address to his party meeting last month, Ramaphosa remarked that “divisions and factions in the ANC are becoming a threat to our democracy”.
Mobs overran dozens of shopping malls and warehouses, carting away flat-screen televisions, refrigerators, leather couches and cartons of fresh meat.
Some even smashed automatic teller machines and emptied them of cash.
“The police admitted that the large numbers were overwhelming,” it said.
– Riot organisers ‘largely faceless’ –
The unrest broke out after Zuma was jailed for contempt over his refusal to testify before a commission probing state corruption during his presidency.
The rioting and looting started in his home region, KwaZulu-Natal, before spreading to Johannesburg.
More than 350 people were killed and some 50 billion rand ($3.2 billion) was wiped off the economy.
The riots were largely organised by protesters on social media, the panel found, with the masterminds remaining “largely faceless”.
To date none of the “real instigators” of the violence have been arrested, something that is “a matter of concern”, the panel said.
Only eight people have appeared in court over the riots, according to the priority crimes unit of the police.
The methods used by protesters, including widespread and simultaneous looting and the torching of property, took the police by “surprise”, the report said.
Police failed to “adapt their tactics to the situation facing them, (they were) inadequately equipped and they ran out of crowd control equipment”, it added.
“There is no doubt that the police had insufficient capacity to stop the violence,” it said.
Days into the unrest, Ramaphosa deployed around 25,000 troops before order was restored and called the violence an attempted insurrection.
After the riots, he shook up his cabinet, scrapped the state security ministry and firmly placed intelligence services under the control of his office.
