From the provocations of the Economic Freedom Fighters to the burning of buses in Nyanga and the closing of schools in Kuruman, the authority of the state is being challenged on multiple fronts.
Its response has sometimes been placatory, but just as often it has chosen to bare its fangs.
These are in for a R3.3 billion sharpening if the SAPS gets its way, suggesting the government will increasingly rely on force to contain rising levels of dissent.
Just more than a week after the unprecedented appearance of riot police in Parliament and the announcement of a “contingency plan” to deal with unruly MPs, SAPS management appeared before the police oversight committee to sell its blueprint for revamping public order policing (POP).
“The republic is currently experiencing an upsurge in violent incidents requiring urgent additional interventions from SAPS. It is anticipated that this upsurge against the state authority will not decline in the foreseeable future due to the current climate of service delivery and related protest actions,” Lieutenant-General Elias Mawela told the committee.
While “community protests” appear to have more or less stabilised after a huge spike over the past decade, violent protests have continued to rise, from 562 incidents in 2006 to 1 907 in the past year – a more than 300 percent increase.
Mawela shared with the committee a riot policeman’s dream inventory: “pyrotechnics” including teargas and stun grenades, water cannon, night sights, long-range acoustic devices that can both record distant conversations and project soundwaves at a frequency that disrupts the balance of its victims, purpose-built armoured transport vehicles and a training facility where the terrain of environments ranging from suburbs to townships can be simulated.
All of this would cost about R1 billion, according to the police presentation.
Beefing up public order policing personnel strength from the existing 4 721 to 9 522 over four years would cost another R2.3bn.
This was required because, as Mawela put it: “The defiance of state authority through attacks on police stations and other community-orientated institutions such as libraries and clinics, cannot be tolerated and the rule of law must prevail. The stability of the republic is essential, especially in the run-up to the local government elections in 2016.”
Laying responsibility for expressions of dissent at the door of the disgruntled and offering to meet it with overwhelming force is a radical departure from the spirit of early legislation and policy of the democratic era, but it goes back at least as far as the remilitarisation of the police under “General” Bheki Cele.
While the immediate post-apartheid emphasis was on a police service that protected the rights and freedoms of citizens, notably in the Regulation of Gatherings Act of 1993, which recognised peaceful protest as a right which police should facilitate, the increased exercise of this right since the mid-2000s has been accompanied by a shift in emphasis on the part of the state, which more and more sees protest as a disturbance of the peace that must be prevented.
Ironically, the relative tranquillity of the early years of democracy led to policy changes and restructuring of the SAPS resulting in the rapid depletion of its capacity for crowd management.
Lulled into a false sense of security and anticipating that protest activity would continue to decline as part of the democratic dividend, the SAPS hugely reduced public order policing numbers and dispersed the specialised units into the ordinary ranks at station level.
Their numbers dwindled from 11 000 in 1995 to today’s 4 197 and their mandate changed to include crime prevention.
But, even as this shift was accelerated from 2006, the number of community protests began to rise exponentially.
The result has been an increasingly rusty, poorly equipped and overstretched public order policing capacity pitted against an ever more frustrated and defiant populace.
The effects of this have been documented by various researchers, among them criminologist Irvin Kinnes in a review conducted on behalf of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa, published last year.
One consequence, according to Kinnes’s research, was that ordinary SAPS members with no crowd management training were increasingly the first to confront protesters.
Their default approach, contrary to a standing order that instructs first responders to “attempt to create an atmosphere which is conducive to negotiations by refraining from the display of aggression, such as for instance the brandishing of firearms and special equipment”, has been to try to stop and disperse them.
Often this has been at the behest of local political leadership, either too afraid to engage hostile crowds, lacking confidence in the police’s ability to manage the protests, or themselves hostile to demonstrators viewed as a threat to their authority.
Instead of adhering to provisions of the Regulation of Gatherings Act requiring them to meet organisers of planned protests and agree on the terms of their conduct before the event, politicians have also increasingly refused permission for protests – a direct contravention of the act and a violation of the constitutional rights of freedom of assembly and expression.
Perceptions and in many cases real instances of corruption, especially at local government level, have fed into this loop of increased confrontation between the populace and the police as the face of state authority.
Citing research into riots in the UK and the 2011 popular uprising in Egypt, Kinnes notes that when police become associated with a political agenda their presence can inflame protesters and even recruit more people to the ranks of the disgruntled, instead of defusing the situation.
The brutal attempts by police to crush protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square had the opposite effect, culminating in the overthrow of the Mubarak regime, for example.
The perception that police efforts to quell protests may be aligned with the wishes of political masters, the frequent refusal of the right to protest peacefully and the lack of capacity to manage protests using a human rights-based approach may be contributing factors to the increasingly violent nature of protests in South Africa.
A R3.3bn investment in more muscle to deal with the “defiance of state authority” will do little to contain it if it is not accompanied by efforts to restore police legitimacy – and that derives from a state whose authority is based, not on force, but on meeting the legitimate expectations of its people.
craig.dodds@inl.co.za
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