SASRIA (South African Special Risks Insurance Association)
The South African state-owned insurer that alone carries cover for riots, strikes, civil commotion and terrorism, excluded from the country's private policies.
SASRIA is South Africa's state-owned special risks insurer, created in 1979 after the Soweto unrest, when private insurers withdrew from political violence cover. The country's private policies exclude riots, strikes, civil commotion, terrorism and political violence, and SASRIA covers them through an add-on cover sold by those same insurers. It is a model of national pooling: a single carrier, a single definition of the perils, and the state as shareholder behind the balance sheet. Its limit is that of any public pool exposed to a single event: correlation is total, since unrest across a region hits all policyholders at once. For the political violence underwriter, SASRIA shows what a market does when the risk becomes too concentrated for private capacity, and what that choice costs when the event occurs.
The July 2021 riots in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng generated about 32 billion rand of claims for SASRIA, and the state had to recapitalize it with 22 billion rand so that it could pay.
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