CETRI
There are grounds for tracing service delivery protests back to the apartheid era, and a
strong case can be made for linking them to discontent that was noted in surveys conducted
in the late 1990s and to the social movements that emerged in the years after 2000 (Seekings
2000, Nthambeleni 2009). However, analysts agree on dating the contemporary phenomenon
back to 2004 (Atkinson 2007, p. 54, Booysen 2007, p. 24, Pithouse 2007).
In defining the object of investigation, Booysen (2007, p. 21) writes of ‘grass-roots protests
against both the quality of service delivery and public representation of grass-roots’
service delivery needs’. Pithouse (2007), who draws on detailed knowledge of shack-dwellers’
protests, rejects this ‘economistic’ approach, arguing that the protests are about ‘citizenship’,
understood as ‘the material benefits of full social inclusion . . . as well as the right to
be taken seriously when thinking and speaking through community organisations.’ Perhaps
the distinction between the two approaches is more one of focus and level of analysis than a
substantive difference about the collection of events that requires explanation. Atkinson’s
interest is in ‘social protests – many of them violent – that wracked black and coloured
townships . . .’ (Atkinson 2007, p. 54). This neatly sidesteps the debate about whether
‘service delivery’ is a defining characteristic, but it opens the scope too broadly. The xenophobic
violence of May 2008, for instance, had very different dynamics, and strikes and
other occupation-related protests (such as those by police, soldiers, students and street traders) are also distinct. This analysis will not, however, ignore the xenophobia and worker
solidarity present in some of the protests that concern us here, or reject the possibility that
there may be underlying causes linking the various actions.
It appears that what we are attempting to grapple with is locally-organised protests
that place demands on people who hold or benefit from political power (which includes,
but is not limited to, local politicians). These have emanated from poorer neighbourhoods
(shack settlements and townships rather than suburbs). Perhaps this is best captured by
defining the phenomenon as one of local political protests or local protests for short.
The form of these actions relates to the kind of people involved and the issues they
have raised. They have included mass meetings, drafting of memoranda, petitions,
toyi-toying, processions, stay-aways, election boycotts, blockading of roads, construction
of barricades, burning of tyres, looting, destruction of buildings, chasing unpopular
individuals out of townships, confrontations with the police, and forced resignations of
elected officials.
The varied nature of such protests makes them difficult to quantify. One potential source
is data collated by the Incident Registration Information System (IRIS), which is maintained
by the South African Police Service (SAPS) Crime Combating Operations’
Visible Policing Unit (VPU). This includes a subset on ‘public gatherings’ (Vally 2009,
p. 10). The definition here of the term ‘public gathering’ derives from the Regulation of
Gatherings Act 1993, which recognised freedom of assembly and protest as democratic
rights, and sought to ensure that these were practised in a peaceful manner (State President
1994, Duncan 2009, p. 4). ‘Gatherings’ were not defined in the Act, although the term
included ‘processions’ (also undefined), and according to Duncan (p. 6) events involving
15 people or fewer were excluded, as these were regarded as ‘demonstrations’ (again undefined).
From a list of ‘prominent reasons’ for gatherings that the VPU provided to Centre for
Sociological Research (CSR) researcher Natasha Vally, it is clear that a large majority of
such events were protest-related (Vally 2009, p. 11). The reasons included ‘demand
wage increase’, ‘solidarity’, ‘dissatisfied with high crime rate’, ‘resistance to government
policy’, ‘mobilising of the masses’, ‘in sympathy with oppressed’, ‘service charges’, and,
finally, ‘sporting event’. While many gatherings were probably local political protests,
the quantity of these as a proportion of the total is unknown. Contrariwise, some of the
actions defined above would not have been included in the IRIS data. Notwithstanding
these qualifications, the data presented in the tables below provide some indication of
the scale of the protest movement. Data for 2008/9 are not yet available.
Table 1 provides the IRIS data for all gatherings broken down by province. The VPU
recognised that some of these figures were unreliable (attributing this to the impact of
institutional restructuring conducted after 2006), and the Mpumulanga figure for 2007/8
is clearly inaccurate (Vally 2009, p. 8). Similar data had been provided to the National
Assembly for the middle two years, but the table presented on that occasion had five
numbers that were different (Internal Question 43/2007, see Vally 2009, p. 18). These
were for the Western Cape – 672 in 2005/6 and 687 in 2006/7 ; for Free State – 673 in
2006/7 ; and for Mpumulanga – 501 in 2005/6 and 547 in 2006/7. The reason for
difference between the two tables is unexplained, and it is not known which of the two
is more reliable, but the disparities are not great. The total gatherings in the National
Assembly statistics are 10,763 for 2005/6 and 9446 for 2006/7. In proportion to both
total and urban populations, the two wealthiest provinces, Gauteng and the Western
Cape, had relatively fewer gatherings than the others, and North West had the highest total.
The VPU distinguishes between gatherings that are ‘peaceful’ and those that are
‘unrest-related’, but it only provides national-level statistics under these two categories.
The numbers are given in Table 2. Again there is a discrepancy between the figures that
were provided to Vally and those presented to the National Assembly. The VPU did not
provide definitions of ‘peaceful’ and ‘unrest-related’ gatherings and it is not known how
the distinction relates to that between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal protests’. In 2004/5, the last
year for which the data are available, the government said that there were 5085 legal and
881 illegal protests (Booysen 2007, p. 23, citing Cape Argus 13 October 2009 ; see also
Atkinson 2007, p. 58). It is probable that ‘unrest’ was more likely to occur in those instances
where a gathering occurred without police permission, and thus was generally regarded by
them as ‘illegal’, because in these cases the police would be entitled to use force to disperse
the event (Vally 2009, p. 12).
Given the imprecise nature of the concepts used by IRIS and a lack of confidence in the
quality of data collection, and given that no comparable figures are available for other
countries, one cannot make any strong claim based on the statistics presented here. For
this author, however, the numbers seem very high, and many times greater than the kind
of figures presented for protests around the world (Walton and Seddon 1994, Dwyer and
Seddon 2002, Seddon and Zeilig 2005). If it is assumed that nearly all the unrestrelated
gatherings were protests of some kind, which is a reasonable assumption, then in
an average week over the period 2004 to 2008 there were more than ten protests involving
‘unrest’. Many of these would have been labour-related, but it seems likely that a high proportion
were local political protests, and one can certainly agree with Duncan (2009, p. 4)
when she draws on the same statistics to propose that ‘protest action became a significant
feature of political life in South Africa during Mbeki’s term of office.’
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