SAHRC acting provincial manager Pavershree Padayachee said they were hard at work with the report. "We are close to finalisation but we cannot provide a date of when the report will be launched or released at this stage." During an interview this week, SAHRC commissioner Philile Ntuli said significant progress had been made and that the commission was in the final stages of putting together its report. "We had our last testimony in June 2022 and in the last year we have been evaluating all of the evidence that has been before us to answer some of the questions including whether we are any wiser, and whether as a country, given the resources that we have, we are able to avoid a situation similar to what we saw in 2021." Ntuli said the SAHRC was shocked and traumatised by the unrest images and footage from KZN and Gauteng. "In moments of trauma, persons and communities react in different ways. Our instinct was to create a platform for society to come together PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa testifies at the SAHRC hearings into the July 2021 unrest in KZN and Gauteng. I TIMOTHY BERNARD African News Agency ANA to make sense of what it is that we were witnessing.
There was a sense of fear and uncertainty amongst all of us at the question of how far this would go and to which extent it would affect our lives," said Ntuli. On July 23 last year, together with the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the Wits University, the SAHRC called a national dialogue to understand what had been witnessed. Ntuli said: "At the outset it was clear that there were concerns of deep socioeconomic divides which were contributing to the extent and the reach of the events in July, the weaknesses and the failures of public institutions as we saw, the incapacity of police to contain the chaos, but there were also resounding concerns about the state of disharmony and lack of solidarity amongst the societal groupings." She said they were concerned about the heightened and racialised levels of poverty that were showing themselves, particularly the racial violence that emanated from parts of KZN. "What we saw in Phoenix shows that until one group of a community or a people are safe and secure in their being and in their enjoyment of this constitutional democracy, other communities or other societies are not going to permanently remain satisfied and that context is a fragile context that awaits a trigger that you saw in July 2021 to remind us of the scars we carry from our history," said Ntuli.

Source: Sunday Tribune