30 arrests after Durban and Soweto immigration protests, and the communities are still waiting for the answers

Thirty people have been arrested after this week’s anti-undocumented-immigration protests in Durban and Johannesburg, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng. The charges include public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest.

The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, the police coordinating body known as NATJOINTS, says heightened deployments will remain in place at hotspots in both cities. That is the state’s answer. The question residents were asking when they took to the streets is a different one, and it has not been answered yet.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, the protests broke out in the Durban CBD, in Soweto and in Johannesburg earlier this week. NATJOINTS briefed on the arrests and on the deployments that will stay in place.

For South Africans living in those areas, the past week has been about a demand they have been making for years. They want to know what is being done about undocumented immigration in their suburbs and their city centres. They want Home Affairs to say how many people are in the country without papers, how many have been removed this year, and why the queues outside their offices are longer than the enforcement that comes out of them. They want to know why informal trading sites, clinics, schools and rented rooms in their areas are under pressure and who is counting the load. Those are the questions that put people on the street. They are legitimate questions and they deserve answers from the department, not a deployment schedule.

NATJOINTS has not said what the protests were about beyond the phrase anti-undocumented-immigration. It has not said how many people marched, where exactly the gatherings happened, or what damage, if any, was caused. The arrests are the only hard number on the record. That number, 30, is a fact and it belongs in the story. It is not the whole story.

What is also on the record is that the protests happened in the Durban CBD, in Soweto and in Johannesburg. Those are three of the busiest parts of the country. The Durban CBD is a trading hub that draws people from across KwaZulu-Natal and beyond. Soweto is the country’s largest township. Johannesburg’s inner city has been the centre of repeated arguments about undocumented immigration, informal trading and building hijacking for more than a decade. When people in those places say the load is too heavy, they are not describing an abstraction. They are describing what they see on their street, in their clinic queue and at their children’s school.

That is why the arrests alone cannot be the end of this story. Thirty people have been charged. The state has a case to make against each of them and it will make it in court. But the enforcement demand that brought people out is still sitting with Home Affairs, with the police and with the municipalities. Until those institutions answer it in public, with numbers and with timelines, the pressure will keep building. That is not a prediction. It is what the past week already shows.

The Enquirer has asked NATJOINTS and Home Affairs for the details behind the deployment figures: how many officers are being sent, to which hotspots, for how long, and what the operation is meant to achieve beyond a visible presence. We have also asked for the number of undocumented immigrants removed from Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal in the past year, and for the current backlog at the Home Affairs offices serving the affected areas. Those are the numbers that would let a reader judge whether the state is answering the demand or managing the headlines.

We will publish the responses when they come. In the meantime, the facts on the record are these. Protests happened in Durban, Soweto and Johannesburg this week. Thirty people were arrested. Police deployments will stay in place. And the residents who marched are still waiting for the answer they went out to demand.