Soweto and Durban protest: 30 arrests, no names, no answers

Thirty people have been arrested after protests against undocumented immigration in Durban, Soweto and Johannesburg this week, and the state has not said who they are, how old they are, or when any of them will appear in court.

The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, the body that coordinates the police, the army and the intelligence services during unrest, says 25 of the arrests were in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng. The counts are for public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. It says heightened police deployments will stay in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg.

That is the sum of the official account. As SABC News reported on 10 October, the deployments are being kept in place in both provinces.

The people who marched are the other half of this story, and they are the half the country is arguing about. Residents in the Durban CBD and in Soweto went onto the streets because they say the load on their areas has become too heavy to carry. They point to informal trading that has been taken over, to clinics and schools under pressure, to rooms rented to people with no papers, and to a Home Affairs system that they say cannot tell them who is in the country or remove anyone who should not be here. They want enforcement. They want the state to do the job it says it is doing.

Those demands did not arrive this week. They have been building in the townships and inner cities for years, and they have been made in memoranda, in community meetings and in marches long before this week’s crowds. What changed this week is that the anger moved into the streets of two of the country’s biggest cities at the same time.

NATJOINTS exists for exactly this. It is the structure that pulls the South African Police Service, the metro police, the defence force and the intelligence community into one command when the state decides a situation needs more than a normal police response. When NATJOINTS briefs, it is speaking for the whole security apparatus, not for one station or one province.

What it has not said is what the arrests mean in practice. There is no court date in the public account. There are no names. There is no breakdown of how many of the 30 were arrested in the act and how many were picked up afterwards. There is no word on how many people were injured, how many properties were damaged, or what the cost of the deployments is likely to be. Those are the questions a South African reader is entitled to ask, and they remain open.

The deployment decision matters beyond this week. Police overtime, public order units pulled from other duties, and soldiers on the streets of two metros all carry a cost, and that cost lands on the same taxpayers whose complaints brought people out in the first place. If the deployments stay in place for weeks, the question of what they are actually achieving becomes a budget question as much as a policing one.

Home Affairs has not featured in the official account of this week at all. There is no word on removals, no word on the state of the visa and permit system, and no word on what happens to anyone found to be in the country without papers once the police deployment ends. The enforcement demand that brought people onto the streets is aimed at that department as much as at the police, and it has not been answered.

Nor has the state said what it will do about the conditions residents describe. If the answer to a protest about the load on clinics, schools and trading spaces is only more police on the corner, the underlying argument does not go away. It waits for the next march.

The Enquirer will keep asking the questions the official briefings have left open. We will report the court roll when the 30 arrested appear, we will report what Home Affairs says about removals and permits, and we will keep reporting what residents in Durban, Soweto and Johannesburg say about the load they are carrying. That is the story, and it is not finished.