Crowds clashed with police and ransacked or burned shopping malls across South Africa on Tuesday with dozens reported killed as grievances unleashed by the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma boiled over into the worst violence in decades.

Protests that followed Zuma’s arrest last week have widened into an outpouring of anger over the inequality that remains 27 years after the end of apartheid.

Poverty has been exacerbated by severe social and economic restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.

Unemployment stood at a new record high of 32.6 percent in the first three months of 2021.

Security officials said the government was working to bring an end to the violence and looting, which has spread from Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal to Johannesburg, the country’s biggest city, and its surrounding province of Gauteng.

The South African Police Service (SAPS) said late on Tuesday that as many as 72 people had lost their lives and 1,234 had been arrested over the last few days as protests descended into looting and riots.

The legal proceedings against Zuma, who is charged with multiple corruption have been seen as a test of post-apartheid South Africa’s ability to enforce the rule of law.

The former president, who has denied wrongdoing, was jailed for contempt after he defied an order to attend an inquiry into high-level graft. The violence has worsened as Zuma challenged the 15-month term in the country’s top court on Monday.

Soldiers have been deployed to help support the police and “restore order”.

Any confrontation with soldiers risks fuelling claims by Zuma and his supporters that they are victims of a politically motivated crackdown by his successor, Cyril Ramaphosa.

The death toll from five days of violence in South Africa has risen to 72, police said Tuesday, despite President Cyril Ramaphosa’s deployment of troops to quell the unrest.

“The total number of people who have lost their lives since the beginning of these protests …has risen to 72,” police said in a statement.

Most of the deaths, the forces, said “relate to stampedes that occurred during incidents of looting of shops”.

Others were linked to shooting and explosions of bank automatic cash machines.

Tumelo Mosethli, a South African entrepreneur based in Johannesburg, said jobs being lost as a result of the unrest will “exacerbate” the current situation.

“We don’t need this – to see people’s shops and businesses being gutted,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Yes, people are hungry today, but tomorrow there’ll be more unemployment, more pain, more suffering in a nation that is trying to recover and rebuild itself.”

Al Jazeera’s correspondent Fahmida Miller reporting from Johannesburg said the situation in the city was “certainly calmer”.

“It is calm, I think we have military police and soldiers deployed here now, they weren’t here earlier in the day,” Miller said.

“But I also think there possibly isn’t anything left in the stores to loot,” she added.

Tim Murithi of The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation says that while the protests following Zuma’s arrest was expected, the large scale of the uprising was “unexpected”.

“I think what was unexpected was the broad scope, and the wide extent which we’ve seen the uprisings in a number of different cities and towns across at least two provinces,” he told Al Jazeera from Cape Town via Skype.

“The key point is this really reveals the multi-layered nature of the crisis … social, economic disparities, social exclusion that goes back to the apartheid legacy in South Africa, combined with years of misrule, paradoxically, by Mr Jacob Zuma between 2009 and 2018.” (Text excluding headline courtesy, Aljazeera)

·File: South African National Defence Force (SANDF) soldiers stand guard as they face a crowd of looters at the Jabulani mall in Soweto on the outskirts of Johannesburg on Tuesday

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