Looting, shooting, blazing trucks and police under fire.
That was the scene this morning on Wit Deep Road in Boksburg where an angry mob of service delivery protesters blockaded the road with burning tyres before setting fire to three trucks.
As the violent public protest threatened to spin out of control, police were forced to call for backup.
Sources said the trucks had been forced to a halt by a mob from the Balmoral informal settlement, and had promptly been set upon by protesters, helping themselves to goods in transit.
When members of the SA Police Service and Ekurhuleni Metro Police Department arrived on the scene, gunfire ensued, and they had to ramp up their response numbers.
Only once Public Order Police officers arrived did law enforcement members manage to bring the situation under control.
Naturally, news of the trucks getting torched has already reverberated through the road freight industry, causing transporters to fear that last month’s spate of truck firebombing on South Africa’s roads was not over.
This was despite reports yesterday that government had undertaken to stage roadblocks on key highways to check that foreign national truck drivers operating in South Africa’s logistics sector were in possession of the relevant work permits.
However, this morning’s unrest on Wit Deep Road is entirely linked to service delivery protests and appears to have nothing to do with the labour unrest allegedly underlying the ongoing threat certain forces pose to the country’s transport sector.
In other news involving key supply lines, service delivery protests have also disrupted road freight on the R49 and Gerrit Maritz Street in Zeerust.
The protests apparently affected traffic on the Platinum Highway towards South Africa’s Kopfontein Border Post with Botswana, and no trucks were allowed to proceed on the N4 towards the border.
