Protests over services down to 3 in W Cape

WHILE the rest of the country is reeling under a spate of violent service delivery protests, toyi-toying for services in the Western Cape has seen a dramatic decrease .

In 2015, Cape Town was one of the most protest-prone municipalities in the country, rocked by at least 84 violent demonstrations, according to the civic protest barometer (CPB) of the University of the Western Cape.

This year, however, there had only been three. These, the city said, were “smaller protests which are normally confined to area-specific issues”.

According to the UWC community law centre, the Western Cape had only overtaken Gauteng once, when, in 2012, the province recorded the most protests in the country. Since then, the Western Cape had been second.

While there may have been many more protests during 2015, the City of Cape Town’s data showed the municipality issued only 42 “gathering permits” in 2015. Last year the city approved 20 while that figure had gone down to three this year.

Provincial ANC spokesperson Lionel Adendorf disputed these figures, saying they were not an accurate reflection of communities’ satisfaction levels with local government.

Mayor Patricia de Lille’s spokesperson, Zara Nicholson, attributed the decline to the Organisation Development and Transformation Plan (ODTP) which “aims to see the administration become more customer centric, more responsive and proactive so that we can detect and prevent problems and work much more closely with residents to resolve issues.”

UWC researchers said the definition of civic protests adopted in their CPB for the year leading up to 2016 excluded protests that were part of civil disobedience campaigns.

The head of the crime and justice programme at the Institute for Security Studies, Gareth Newham, said: “We do not disagree with the UWC or Cape Town figures as we do not know… what data they are using… if they are only counting service delivery protests targeting local government, there very well could be a decrease”.