Soweto and Durban residents demand action on undocumented immigration as 30 are arrested
NATJOINTS says heightened police deployments remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg after this week's protests.
Residents in Durban and Soweto who marched this week against undocumented immigration are still waiting for an answer from the state, after 30 people were arrested and police deployments were kept in place at hotspots in both cities.
Twenty-five of the arrests were in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng. The offences listed are public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, NATJOINTS, says the heightened deployments will remain at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg.
The protests happened in the Durban CBD, in Soweto and in Johannesburg earlier this week. They were about undocumented immigration, and they came from communities that have been saying for years that the load on clinics, schools, housing and informal trading space has become too heavy to carry quietly.
That is the demand the state is now answering. Not with a policy change, not with a resourcing plan for the services under pressure, but with a deployment and an arrest count.
As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS said criminality will not be tolerated and that the deployments would stay in place.
For readers outside the two cities, the acronym matters. NATJOINTS is the structure that coordinates the SAPS, the metro police, the defence force and the intelligence services when a policing situation is judged to need more than one arm of the state. When it briefs, it is speaking for the whole security cluster, not for one department. Its decisions about where to deploy and for how long are operational, and they are the clearest signal of how seriously the state is treating a stretch of unrest.
The numbers are small against the size of the two metros. Thirty arrests across two provinces, in a week in which the Durban CBD and parts of Soweto saw crowds on the street, tells a reader that most of the people who turned out were not arrested. It does not tell a reader how many people marched, how long the crowds stayed, what was damaged, or what the residents who organised the marches actually handed over as a demand.
Those are the questions a South African reader will ask next. Who called the marches. What was in the memorandum, if there was one. Which streets were closed and for how long. Which shops and which transport routes were affected. What the residents want Home Affairs, the SAPS and the metro to do differently, and by when.
The communities in Durban and Soweto are not new to this argument. Informal traders in both cities have been saying for years that their pitches and their stock are under pressure. Residents in both have been saying that clinics and schools are carrying numbers they were not built for. Whether the state agrees with the diagnosis or not, the demand is on the record now, in two provinces, in the same week.
What is also on the record is that the state has chosen its first response. Deployments stay. Arrests have been made. Charges have been named.
What is not on the record, in the briefing as it stands, is anything about the underlying question. No figure for how many people in the country are undocumented. No plan for the Home Affairs queues that applicants and citizens both stand in. No commitment on inspections at workplaces, on border posts, or on the documentation backlog that keeps people in a legal limbo for months. No word on what happens to the people who were arrested, or when they will appear in court.
A reader in Durban or Soweto is entitled to ask which of those two tracks is the real one. The security track is visible. The administrative track, which is where undocumented immigration is actually resolved or not resolved, is not.
The Enquirer is seeking the following from the SAPS, NATJOINTS, the KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng community safety departments, and Home Affairs: the court dates for the 30 people arrested, the full list of charges against each, the operational cost of the deployments, the memoranda or demands handed to any state office by the marchers, and Home Affairs’ current figures for the asylum and documentation backlog in both provinces. We will publish what we get.
Until then, the record stands as it is. Thirty arrests. Two provinces. Deployments still in place. And communities in Durban and Soweto still waiting for an answer to the question they went into the street to ask.
