The increase in violent protests points to a bigger question about the quality of South Africa’s democracy, writes Craig Dodds.
With fewer than two months until the August 3 local government elections the national reserve of public order police has already been depleted by the need for a long-term deployment in Vuwani, Limpopo, while the fires of protest burn in KwaMashu, Glebelands, Bronkhorstspruit and other areas.
Head of public order policing Major-General Zeph Mkhwanazi told an Institute for Security Studies (ISS) seminar on public violence this week he had been forced to borrow from more stable provinces to cover the need for reinforcements in Limpopo because the national floating reserve unit of 287 members, which is usually dispatched to trouble spots, was already depleted by the high levels of violent protests.
Gareth Newham, head of the ISS’s governance, crime and justice division, said police had to respond to 35 gatherings a day last year, six of which had, on average, turned violent. While the number of protests had declined somewhat since the peak of 2013, the proportion of violent protests had increased, the seminar heard.
Mkhwanazi said the SAPS had a three-year plan to boost the number of public order police from 4 227 to more than 11 000 - roughly the number in 1995, when the apartheid-era riot-control units, including those from the former homelands, were amalgamated into a single public order service within the SAPS. This compares to a low of 2 595 members in 2006 following a restructuring of the SAPS informed by the - now patently mistaken - belief the days of mass protest were over.
Mkhwanazi posed a question for himself: would three years be soon enough to replenish the public order units, given the demands already facing them and with elections in sight, when the SAPS will be expected to ensure the safety of voting stations and manage tensions that may arise when the results come in. If violent protest was a response to the violence of the apartheid state, the fact public order police numbers are set to rise again to levels last witnessed during apartheid poses the question: is the exponential increase in the levels of violent protest a sign of unravelling confidence in the promise of democracy?
The question is complicated by the lack of authoritative data on the extent and causes of protests, the majority of which are peaceful, and the triggers for violence.
Lizette Lancaster, manager of the crime and justice information hub at the ISS, noted protests could shift from a complaint over housing into a xenophobic rampage if the original issue was not addressed.
Researchers relied heavily on media reports to track protests, but the concentration of media in the major metros could result in a skewed picture in which protests in rural areas were under-reported. The media also tended to focus on violent protests, which might explain why data compiled from media reports showed more than half of protests were violent, compared to police statistics showing only 10 percent were.
Protests relating to industrial action were by far the biggest proportion of the total at 22 percent, compared to just 1 percent over land issues, according to the database compiled from media reports.
Various kinds of protests related to services - housing (6 percent), electricity (2 percent), water (2 percent) and sanitation or refuse collection (1 percent) - while significantly fewer were far more likely to turn violent. While labour-related protests turned violent in 30Âpercent of cases, this happened in 70 percent of protests over housing, 71 percent for electricity, 72Âpercent for water and 68 percent for sanitation and refuse collection.
The data presents a limited picture, then, on the precise causes of protests and the reasons some turn violent.
However, both Lancaster and Mkhwanazi cited a number of risk factors that could provoke violence.
Lancaster said by the time a protest turned violent there were usually a number of interventions that could have been made along the way to prevent this.
Mkhwanazi said in cases where the relevant authorities refused to receive a memorandum of grievances or failed to respond to grievances, the police found themselves caught in the middle.
This made the police, in the eyes of the public, the face of an unresponsive government, Lancaster said.
A World Health Organisation “ecological frameworkâ€ù of risk factors for violence mirrored issues relevant in South Africa, citing political factors like inadequate democratic processes, unequal access to power, government corruption and societal factors like inequality, uneven development and access to resources, high unemployment, high population density and rapid social change.
Tsholofelo Sesanga of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation said violence was a learned behaviour and, in the case of South Africa, people had learned during apartheid to deal with grievances through violence.
There was an entrenched culture of using informal structures to address crime and violence, for example through vigilantism.
Violence was understood as a language that allowed people who felt they were not being heard to express themselves and make themselves heard.
The scars of apartheid went deep, she said and required a focus on healing and addressing its legacies of inequality and poverty, among others.
Helping marginalised groups build their capacity to engage with the state and discover their collective agency in dealing with the issues they confronted had shown promising results in dealing with the consequences and causes of violence.
Macdonald Rammala, research assistant at Unisa’s Institute for Dispute Resolution in Africa, described a project in Moutse where a demarcation dispute raged for a number of years over plans for the community to fall under Limpopo province instead of Mpumalanga.
The community felt services were better in Mpumalanga, but were also aggrieved by the appointment of teachers, education department officials and politically connected people as election officials, the lack of voter education and distribution of food parcels in the run-up to the polls and the playing of loud music at polling stations.
They complained they didn’t even know who their councillor was, while developments were thrust on them without consultation, like a taxi rank that was built but remained unused to this day.
They wanted development relevant to needs, Rammala said.
While data may be inconclusive, a common thread in all presentations was that violence was more often than not a response to a sense of alienation of the marginalised, who struggled to be heard and were frequently ignored or merely “appeased” by authorities.
Beyond the shifting electoral fortunes of political parties in the coming polls, the increase in violent protest points to a bigger question about the quality of democracy itself and the mechanisms that are lacking or have been allowed to wither that would make it truly participatory.
Silencing the voices of excluded communities, as SABC boss Hlaudi Motsoeneng intends to do, or failing to live up to the commitments of the constitution, as the Constitutional Court found this week the Independent Electoral Committee had done, can only be a recipe for disaster.
Political Bureau