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JOHANNESBURG. – Violence and looting has raged in South Africa for the sixth day running, stoking fears of food and fuel shortages as disruption to farming, manufacturing and oil refining began to bite amid the country’s worst unrest in decades.

More than 70 people have died as grievances over the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma have widened into an outpouring of anger over the inequality that remains 27 years after the end of apartheid.

More than 1 200 people have been arrested in the lawlessness that has raged in poor areas of two provinces, where a community radio station was ransacked and forced off the air on Tuesday and some Covid-19 vaccination centres were closed, disrupting urgently needed inoculations.

Many of the deaths in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces occurred in chaotic stampedes as thousands of people stole food, electric appliances, liquor and clothing from stores.

The deployment of 2 500 soldiers to support the overwhelmed South African police has so far failed to stop the rampant looting.

But in signs of a public backlash, residents in some areas yesterday turned suspected looters into police, blocked entrances to malls and in some cases armed themselves as vigilantes to form road blocks or scare them away.

In Vosloorus, southern Johannesburg, minibus taxi operators, many of whom have guns, fired bullets into the air to scare off looters.

“We can’t just allow people from nowhere to come and loot here,” said Paul Magolego, Vosloorus taxi association spokesperson, adding that taxi drivers had had no business since Monday because of the unrest.

Underscoring the inherent dangers in such vigilantism, a 15-year-old boy was killed by a stray bullet in Vosloorus, according to a Reuters photographer who saw the body. Magolego said the taxi owners arrived on the scene after he was dead.

In Alexandra township in northern Johannesburg, one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, soldiers moving door-to-door to confiscate stolen items, with the help of civilians opposed to the looting.

Citizens armed with guns, many from South Africa’s white minority, blocked off streets to prevent further plundering, in Durban.

Others were forming online groups to help clean up and rebuild devastated neighbourhoods.

President Cyril Ramaphosa met political party leaders yesterday to discuss the unrest, and was considering their suggestion of an “expanded deployment of the South African National Defence Force,” a presidency statement said.

The violence appeared to have abated in some areas yesterday, but in others, there was renewed burning and looting.

Some rich Durban residents chartered small planes and helicopters out of the city – Al Jazeera-Reuters.