Durban traders lost days of business to the shutdown, and 25 of the 30 arrests have to answer for it

Traders in the Durban CBD counted the cost of days they could not open this week, after protest action against undocumented immigration shut parts of the city centre and spilled into Soweto and Johannesburg. Thirty people have been arrested, 25 of them in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, for offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest.

The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, NATJOINTS, says heightened police deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg. That is the state’s answer to a week in which the pressure South Africans have been putting on the immigration system moved from the queue and the counter into the street.

For the people who work the Durban CBD, the shutdown was not an abstraction. Traders who rely on a day’s takings lost trading days. Commuters were diverted. The city centre, which carries a large share of the province’s informal trade, went quiet in the places where the crowds gathered. Those are the consequences that sit underneath the arrest count, and they are the reason the week mattered to people who never joined a march.

The 25 arrests in KwaZulu-Natal carry the weight of the total. KwaZulu-Natal is where the week’s action was concentrated, and it is the province where the argument over undocumented immigration, informal trading and the load on clinics, schools and policing has been running longest. Gauteng accounted for five of the 30 arrests.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS said criminality will not be tolerated and that deployments at the hotspots would be maintained. The structure is the state’s standing coordinating body for major operations, bringing the police, the metro departments and the intelligence services into one command. When it speaks, it is describing a posture rather than a single incident, and its message this week was that the police presence is not being packed up yet.

What the public record from that briefing does not carry is the demand that brought people into the streets in the first place. South Africans who marched this week were pressing for enforcement, for the immigration system to be seen to work, and for the pressure they say undocumented immigration puts on their towns and their livelihoods to be answered. That demand does not disappear because the crowds have gone home. It is the question the state still has to answer, and the deployment of more police is a response to the disorder rather than a reply to the argument.

The offences listed by NATJOINTS are the state’s case against the people it has taken into custody. Each of the 30 is entitled to the ordinary protections of the law, and the counts they face will be tested in court rather than in a briefing. The arrests are a fact. They are not the whole of what happened this week, and they are not the reason people were on the street.

What South Africans will be watching now is whether the heightened deployments hold the hotspots calm, and whether the enforcement demand that produced the marches is met with anything more durable than a police line. The queues at Home Affairs, the pressure on services in the areas where the protests happened, and the state’s capacity to act on undocumented immigration are the substance of the argument. None of that was settled this week.

The Enquirer is following the cases of those arrested and the status of the deployments at the Durban and Johannesburg hotspots, and will report what the record shows as it develops.