Durban and Soweto protests: 30 arrested as police deployments stay in place

Thirty people have been arrested after protests against undocumented immigration in the Durban CBD, Soweto and Johannesburg this week, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure said.

The arrests were for offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. NATJOINTS said heightened police deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg.

NATJOINTS is the structure that coordinates the police, the metro police and the intelligence services when a public order situation crosses provincial or municipal lines. When it announces that deployments will remain, it is saying the state expects more of the same, and that the police presence South Africans can see on the street is not being stood down.

That is the position as the week ends. Residents in the affected areas are the ones who have to weigh what the protests have cost them against what the people on the street are demanding, and the two are not the same argument.

The protests were against undocumented immigration. That demand is a public position held by South Africans who live with the pressure on clinics, schools, housing and informal trading, and who want enforcement they can see. The people who marched are the subject of this story, not a side-issue in it.

What the state has said so far is narrow. It has confirmed arrests and deployments. It has not set out what, if anything, changes for the Home Affairs queues, for the people waiting on asylum decisions, or for the enforcement capacity that residents say they are not seeing. Those are the questions the week has put on the table.

The 30 arrests carry their own breakdown by province, and the offences listed are the ones the state says it will pursue. That is a statement of the case against named individuals, not a description of the protest as a whole.

For people in Durban and Johannesburg, the practical effect of the week is a continued visible police presence at identified hotspots. For the residents of the areas where the protests happened, it is also a reckoning with a public argument that has not been resolved by an arrest count.

The demand that produced the marches remains on the table. South Africans who want enforcement on undocumented immigration have made their position clear in public, and the state’s answer so far has been operational rather than policy. What South Africans will watch next is whether the deployments stay at hotspot level or whether they are matched by anything on the Home Affairs side.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS held a briefing at which it said criminality would not be tolerated and set out the arrest figures and the continued deployments.

The Enquirer will keep reporting on the enforcement question and the load on services in the affected areas.