FNB Stadium, where the memorial was held, seats 95,000 people. Even with a steady rain and thousands of empty seats in uncovered areas, there were tens of thousands of people in the area with the president. It appears most of them got in without going through any security.

“There were no security checks upon entry to the stadium,” a local South African activist wrote Friday in a letter to the Johannesburg Star newspaper. “I walked freely to my seat without passing through metal detectors, being searched or any other check.”

The stadium’s main entrance was “completely unattended,” a reporter for a local Washington DC television station told Politico. “There were no workers performing bag checks or patdowns — there were no magnetometers to walk through, no metal detector wands being used — anywhere.”