30 arrests, no names, no firearm answer: what NATJOINTS is not telling South Africa after the Durban and Soweto protests

Thirty people have been arrested, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and 5 in Gauteng, after days of protest in the Durban CBD, Soweto and Johannesburg, and the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure says heightened police deployments will stay in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS put the arrests at 30 for offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. That is the account the state has given so far. It is also, at this stage, almost all the state has given.

NATJOINTS is the structure that coordinates the South African Police Service with the intelligence services and other government departments during large-scale operations. When it says deployments will remain at hotspots, it is describing a policing posture, not a prosecutorial one. The arrests it has confirmed are the opening of a criminal process, not the end of it.

What the record does not yet answer is the part South Africans will want answered. Who are the accused, once their identity may lawfully be published? What is each person actually charged with, individually rather than as a category? What are their ages, where the state or a court has established them, and what is their immigration or asylum status, where the state has established it? Was any firearm involved, and if so, was it licensed, to whom, and where did it come from? What identity and status checks did police perform after arrest? Was any weapon recovered? How many people were injured, and how seriously? And what is the date of the next court appearance?

The Enquirer is not able to answer those questions from the material the state has released. Neither, on the record, is anyone else. That is the gap.

The protest action itself was about undocumented immigration, and the people who took part were making an enforcement demand. That demand is not an allegation to be balanced away. It is a political position held by South Africans who live with the consequences of a Home Affairs system that has been under strain for years, of informal trading that is contested street by street, of clinics and schools absorbing numbers they were not built for, and of a police service that residents say cannot keep up. Whether or not a reader agrees with the demand, it is the reason the streets filled, and a briefing that reports only the arrest count leaves it out.

There is a second thing the briefing does not settle. The offences listed, public violence and illegal gathering among them, describe what the state says happened. They do not describe what the people who marched say they were there for. Both accounts can be reported. Only one of them has been reported in detail so far.

What ordinary South Africans will notice in the coming days is concrete. If deployments remain at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg, residents in those areas will see more police vehicles and more stops. Commuters through the Durban CBD and through Soweto will see the same. Traders and small businesses in those areas, already carrying the cost of the days of disruption, will carry the cost of the heightened presence too. And the people arrested will move through the courts, where the charges will have to be put to each of them individually and where the state will have to show what it has.

That is the next dated step that matters, and it is the one the record does not yet supply: the first court appearance for the 30. Until a date is given and the charge sheets are put on the record, the public is being asked to accept a number without a case.

The Enquirer will report the appearance dates and the charges when the courts make them available. In the meantime, the questions above are the ones the police and the National Prosecuting Authority can answer now, on the record, without prejudicing any prosecution: how many people were injured and how seriously, whether any weapon was recovered and whether any firearm was licensed and to whom, what identity and status checks were performed after arrest, and when the accused will first appear. Those answers cost nothing to give and they are owed to the public whose streets were shut.