Durban and Soweto traders count the cost as anti-immigration marches bring a week of chaos

Traders and residents in the Durban CBD, Soweto and Johannesburg are counting the cost of a week in which anti-undocumented-immigration protest moved through their streets and a heavier police presence settled over the hotspots where it happened.

South Africans who marched want enforcement. They want the undocumented immigration that has reshaped the informal trading economy of the Durban CBD, the hostels and streets of Soweto and the inner city of Johannesburg dealt with by the state, and they have been saying so for years. That demand is the reason the crowds were on the streets this week, and it is the question the state now has to answer.

What the country saw instead was days of disruption. As SABC News reported on 10 October, the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure (NATJOINTS) said heightened police deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg, where protests erupted over the past few days. Chaos broke out in the Durban CBD, Soweto and Johannesburg earlier in the week, following the anti-undocumented-immigration protests. Thirty arrests have since been made, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, for offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest.

For the people who live and work in those areas, the week has been measured in lost trading hours, closed routes and a heavier police presence on streets that are already contested ground. Informal traders in the Durban CBD, many of them South African, have spent years arguing that the sheer density of unregulated trading in the area has squeezed their margins and made the city’s enforcement priorities a live political question. Soweto and inner-city Johannesburg residents have raised the same concerns about overcrowded accommodation, pressure on clinics and schools, and crime.

NATJOINTS is the structure that coordinates the SAPS, the metro police, the defence force and the intelligence services when a policing problem outgrows a single province. Its decision to keep deployments in place is a signal that the state expects the pressure on those areas to continue rather than subside, and that it is treating the situation as an operational matter rather than a policy one.

That is the gap South Africans are pointing at. The people who marched were not asking for a permanent police cordon. They were asking for the enforcement of existing immigration law, for Home Affairs to process and act, and for the load that undocumented immigration places on clinics, schools, housing and informal trading to be acknowledged and addressed. A deployment answers disorder. It does not answer the demand that produced it.

The 30 arrests are the state’s response to what it has classified as public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. Those are the counts that have been recorded. They are not the whole story of why people were on the streets, and they should not be read as one.

What South Africans will be watching now is whether the deployment is matched by anything on the immigration side. Home Affairs has not, in the material available, set out what processing or enforcement steps accompany the policing. The department has not said what will change for the people who have been waiting in its queues, or for the traders and residents who say the pressure on their areas has been building for years. Until that answer comes, the deployment will look to many like a lid rather than a solution.

The Enquirer will keep reporting on what the state does next on enforcement, what happens to the people arrested this week, and what the residents and traders of the Durban CBD, Soweto and Johannesburg say about whether anything has actually changed for them.