SA has a protest every two days
2013-01-21 11:21
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Athandiwe Saba and Jeanne van der Merwe, Media24 Investigations
Johannesburg - South Africa’s wave of service delivery
protests is far greater than previously imagined, with official police data
revealing more than 3 000 protests in the past four years.
Media24 Investigations used access to information law to ask
the South African Police Service for official records showing service delivery
protests across the country since January 2009.
According to the data, there is a service delivery protest in
South Africa - either violent or peaceful - at least once every two days.
Major protests
The true scale of the protests is far greater than other
estimates.
Monitoring agency Municipal IQ recorded 410 “major service
delivery protests” from 2009 to 2012.
The organisation records sustained protests over multiple
days as a single occurrence.
The University of the Western Cape’s Service Delivery
Protest Barometer - which uses a slightly broader definition, but like
Municipal IQ sources its data from media reports and other public records - arrived
at about 720 protests from the beginning of 2009 to the end of August 2012.
Karen Heese of Municipal IQ says the large variance between
their numbers and those of the police can be attributed to how the protests are
counted - her organisation focuses solely on protests against the
municipalities, while protests reflected in the police data could also be those
against other government bodies such as provincial governments.
“My understanding of the SAPS data is that it is per
incident, so while we recorded, say, Olifantshoek as a single protest, there
could well be hundreds of SAPS incidents reported, even perhaps on the same
day,” she said.
The police records - which show protests specifically
classified as service delivery-related - show that there were 3 258 service
delivery protests in the country between January 2009 and November last year,
when the request for information was filed.
Comprehensive count
The records show service delivery protests by residential
areas and policing districts across South Africa. This is the first time such a
comprehensive count of service delivery protests has been made public.
Mmabatho in the North West had the
highest number of service delivery protests, one every 4.7 days over nearly
four years. Of those, 190 were peaceful and 111 were accompanied by unrest.
Johannesburg had the second-highest number of protests (293),
with Lenasia and Soweto with 26 protests and 39 respectively over the past four
years. The Pretoria district was third with 235.
Mbombela (Nelspruit) district had one of the most violent
service delivery protests, with 106 violent protests and 61 peaceful protests.
The Northern Cape recorded 74 violent and 65 peaceful protests.
- Media24 Investigations
