Durban and Soweto want the protests policed, not prosecuted

Thirty people have been arrested after days of anti-undocumented immigration protest in Durban, Soweto and Johannesburg, and the communities who took to the streets say the answer they are waiting for is enforcement at Home Affairs, not charges for the crowd.

The arrests are split 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, on counts including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, the inter-departmental command that coordinates police, metro and intelligence operations during unrest, says heightened deployments will stay in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg.

That is the state’s account of the week. The people who marched have a different question, and it is the one that has not been answered: when does the enforcement they are demanding actually arrive.

Residents in the affected areas of Durban, Soweto and Johannesburg have been saying for years that the pressure on clinics, schools, housing and informal trading space is real and visible, and that the paperwork from Home Affairs never seems to catch up with it. The protests this week were not a sudden event. They were the latest expression of a demand that South Africans have been making in community meetings, in letters to MPs and in queues outside Home Affairs offices for a long time. What the marchers want is straightforward. They want undocumented people processed, they want the asylum system to distinguish between people who qualify and people who do not, and they want the state to show that it can count who is in the country and act on what it finds.

Whether every person in those crowds was there for that reason is a separate question, and it is the one the arrests now turn on. The 30 people in custody have not been named. The charges against them are the state’s case, not a finding, and the record does not yet show what any individual is alleged to have done. Public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest are counts that attach to conduct, and each one has to be proved against a named person in a court. Until that happens, the arrests are an allegation with a case number.

That distinction matters for the communities themselves. The people who marched are not the same as anyone who may have broken the law in the course of the week, and treating the two as one thing is how a legitimate public demand gets buried under a charge sheet. The demand stands on its own. It was being made before this week and it will be made after the last of the 30 has appeared in court.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS says criminality will not be tolerated and deployments remain at hotspots in the two provinces. That is the operational position, and it is accurate as far as it goes. What it does not carry is the reason the crowds formed. A reader who only sees the deployment line learns that police are on the street. A reader who lives in Soweto, in the Durban CBD or in the inner city of Johannesburg learns something else, which is that the street is where the argument has moved because the offices have not answered it.

The institutions in this story are worth naming plainly. NATJOINTS is not a single police unit. It is the standing structure that pulls SAPS, metro police, the defence force where needed, and the intelligence services into one command when unrest is expected or under way. Its briefings are operational. They tell the public where the deployments are, what the arrest count is and what charges have been registered. They are not a policy forum and they are not the place where Home Affairs answers a question about permits, asylum applications or removals. That answer has to come from the department, and it has not come in this material.

What ordinary people will notice in the coming days is concrete. More police vehicles in the CBD and in the townships named as hotspots. Road closures where crowds gather. A slower commute. And, in the background, the same Home Affairs queues that were there before the marches, with the same people in them, waiting for a document that decides whether they stay or go.

That is the gap the protests were about. South Africans have been asked, repeatedly, to trust a system that they can see is not keeping up. The marches were the sound of that trust running out. The arrests are what the state did about the noise. They are not an answer to the question.

The Enquirer is putting the enforcement questions directly to Home Affairs and to NATJOINTS: how many undocumented people were processed in the affected provinces in the past year, how many removals were carried out, how long the average asylum application now takes, and what additional capacity, if any, has been assigned to the Durban and Johannesburg offices since the protests. When those answers come, they will be published alongside the record of what was demanded on the streets this week.