Voters use protests to fight back
Politicians, parties sit up and listen
Voters in SA have wised up to the fact that protests work and that politicians seem to listen when these erupt during an election season.
This is the view of Trevor Ngwane, senior researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change, following the protests that engulfed Gauteng and other parts of SA last week. “Voters are getting wise. They are protesting during election time when the ears of political parties and political elite are opened because they are looking for votes,” he said. “The voter feels abused. Political parties come with promises which are never fulfilled. People are also learning that protests work... Clearly if you protest during this time you are going to get results,” Ngwane said. Last week, protests erupted across SA, including in Alexandra, Bekkersdal, Tshwane, Emfuleni, Soweto, Kroonstad in the Free State and the Western Cape. In Johannesburg, mayor Herman Mashaba blamed the ANC for instigating the protests to embarrass the DAled council. Professor Alex van den Heever of the Wits School of Governance said there was suspicious political influence in recent protests. “I’m quite suspicious on the nature of these protests and whether they are truly community responses. They seem to be directed by political parties… They have been done to embarrass a certain political party. In the case of Gauteng [Alexandra], there is a particular way in which the protests follow. It looked like an ANC event targeted at a certain level of government. I think it is very similar in other areas like Tshwane as well,” he said. According to Municipal IQ, which monitors protests across SA, the beginning of 2019 has seen a increase in the number of protests after a lull in the last quarter of 2018. Kevin Allan, MD of Municipal IQ, said: “As was widely anticipated, protests have surged to a new record for the first quarter. It is likely that protesters are making the most of the opportunity to draw politicians’ attention to their grievances in the run-up to elections.”
The organisation recorded 67 protests between January and last month. Gauteng was top with 21% of the protests; KwaZulu-Natal with 15%, Western Cape 13%, Free State 9%, Limpopo and Mpumalanga 6% each, North West 5% and Northern Cape 3%.