30 arrests after anti-immigration protests shut Durban and Joburg streets, police stay in hotspots

Residents in Durban and Johannesburg took to the streets this week over undocumented immigration, and by Friday the police had made 30 arrests across the two provinces. Twenty-five of those arrests were in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, according to the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, the inter-departmental command body known as NATJOINTS.

The charges, as NATJOINTS set them out, are public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. Those are the state’s case against named individuals and they will be tested in court. What the residents who marched were saying is a separate matter and it is the reason the streets filled in the first place.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS said heightened police deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg, where protests erupted over the past few days. The structure’s position is that criminality will not be tolerated.

For anyone who lives or works in the Durban CBD, in Soweto or in central Johannesburg, the practical effect this week was disruption. Roads closed. Trade slowed or stopped. Commuters rerouted. That is what a protest does to a city, and it is what residents on both sides of this argument are living with while the deployments hold.

The anger behind the marches is not new and it is not confined to one street. South Africans in townships and inner-city areas have been raising the same set of complaints for years: pressure on clinics and schools, competition for informal trading space, rooms rented at rates locals say they cannot match, and a Home Affairs system that leaves people waiting months for documents while the streets around them change faster than the state can account for. Those are the conditions residents describe. They are the reason the crowds gathered.

NATJOINTS is the structure that coordinates the SAPS, the metro police, the defence force and the intelligence services when an event crosses more than one province or more than one department. It is not a standing police unit. It is switched on for operations like this one, and its briefings are the state’s account of what it is doing and why. When NATJOINTS says deployments will remain, it means the visible policing in those areas is not being scaled back yet.

The 30 arrests are a fact of this week. They are not the whole story of it. The people who marched were demanding enforcement, and the state’s answer so far is a police presence and a set of charges. Whether that answer holds depends on what happens in the courts and on whether the underlying complaints are addressed at all.

What a South African reader should watch next is straightforward. The deployments stay up. The cases against the 30 arrested will move through the system. And the residents who marched will still be in those same streets, with the same clinics, the same schools and the same queues, when the police go home.

The Enquirer is following the court appearances and will report what the record shows as the cases proceed.