NATJOINTS keeps Durban and Joburg deployments, 30 arrested after immigration protests

The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, the body that coordinates the police, the metro departments, the intelligence services and the border and traffic arms during a national operation, says its heightened deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg. The structure, known as NATJOINTS, briefed on the situation following protests against undocumented immigration in the Durban CBD, in Soweto and in Johannesburg earlier this week.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, 30 arrests have been made, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, for offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. That is the extent of the state’s public account so far.

What the record does not yet answer is the set of questions that matters most after any mass arrest. The names of the accused, where their identity may lawfully be published. Their ages, where the state or a court has established them. What each individual is actually charged with, as opposed to the list of offences recorded across the group. Whether any firearm was involved, whether it was licensed and to whom, and where it came from. What identity and immigration or asylum checks the police performed after the arrests. Whether any weapon was recovered. How many people were injured and how seriously. And the date of the next court appearance.

On that last point the record is silent. No court date has been given publicly. No breakdown of the charges by individual has been given. No injury count has been given. No weapon has been described in any statement carried so far. None of that is a finding against the police. It is simply what the state has said and what it has not.

South Africans will recognise the shape of this operation. NATJOINTS is not a police station or a single unit. It is the standing coordinating structure that sits above the SAPS, the metro police, the intelligence community, the Border Management Authority and the traffic authorities when an event crosses provincial lines or threatens to. When it says deployments will remain in place, it is saying the coordination stays switched on, not that a particular street will be held by a particular number of officers. The practical effect for a resident of the Durban CBD or of Soweto is that police numbers stay up, road closures and stop-and-search activity can continue, and the visible presence that residents have been demanding in some areas and complaining about in others does not come down yet.

That ambiguity is the live public argument. The protests that produced these arrests were about undocumented immigration, and the residents who marched have been asking for enforcement, for documentation checks, for action on informal trading, on housing and on crime. The state’s answer so far is a deployment and an arrest count. Those are two different things. A deployment is a presence. An arrest count is a number. Neither, on its own, tells a South African whether the documentation checks that people have been demanding are actually happening, whether the people arrested were in the country unlawfully, or whether anyone who is here unlawfully was removed. The record does not say.

The offences listed by the state are public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. Read carefully, those are charges about conduct at a gathering, not charges about immigration status. That distinction matters, and it is the kind of distinction that gets lost when a protest story is told only through an arrest count. A person arrested at a march is not, by that fact alone, an undocumented migrant, and an undocumented migrant is not, by that fact alone, a person who committed public violence. The state has not said that any of the 30 are foreign nationals. It has not said that any of them are South African. It has not said how many of the 30 face which charge. Those are open questions and they are the questions that should be put to the SAPS and to the National Prosecuting Authority.

The other open question is the one that always follows a crowd event where property was damaged. If a firearm was discharged, whose was it, was it licensed, and where did it come from. The state’s account as carried does not mention a firearm at all. That is not the same as saying there was none. It means the public record does not yet carry the answer, and until it does, the question stands.

For readers in KwaZulu-Natal, the 25 arrests in the province are the larger share and they took place in the Durban CBD, the busiest trading and transport corridor in the city. For readers in Gauteng, the five arrests cover both Soweto and Johannesburg, which the state has treated as one operational area. Neither figure is large against the size of the crowds that gathered. What the figures do not tell a reader is what happens next to any of the 30, and that is the accountability question. An arrest is not a charge. A charge is not a conviction. The next dated step, once the police or the prosecuting authority provides it, will be the first court appearance, and that is the point at which the names, the ages, the individual charges and any bail position become part of the record.

Until then, the state’s position is that criminality will not be tolerated and that deployments remain. That is a position, and it is the state’s to hold. What South Africans are owed alongside it is the paperwork that turns a position into an answer: who was arrested, on what charge each, on what evidence, and when they appear.