Protests in South Africa

South Africa has been dubbed "the protest capital of the world", with one of the highest rates of public protests in the world.

It is often argued that the rate of protests has been escalating since 2004, However Steven Friedman argues that the current wave of protests stretches back to the 1970s. The rate of protests "rose dramatically in the first eight months of 2012" and it was reported that there 540 protests in the province of Gauteng between 1 April and 10 May 2013. In February 2014 it was reported that there had been "nearly 3,000 protest actions in the last 90 days – more than 30 a day– involving more than a million people".

Since 2008 more than 2 million people have taken to the streets in protest every year.Njabulo Ndebele argues that "Widespread 'service delivery protests' may soon take on an organisational character that will start off as discrete formations and then coalesce into a full-blown movement". There has been considerable repression of popular protests. The most common reasons for protests are grievances around urban land and housing. It has been reported that "Nearly 75% of South Africans aged 20-29 did not vote in the 2011 [local government] elections" and that "South Africans in that age group were more likely to have taken part in violent street protests against the local ANC than to have voted for the ruling party".

In September 2013 the police reported that they had "made more than 14,000 arrests at protests in the past four years".

According to The Times "Informal settlements have been at the forefront of service delivery protests as residents demand houses and basic services".

During the 2004/05 financial year about 6,000 protests were officially recorded, an unknown number of protests went unrecorded, and about 1,000 protests were illegally banned. This meant that at least 15 protests were taking place each day in South Africa at this time. However the number of protests has escalated dramatically since then and Business Day reports that "2009 and 2010 together account for about two-thirds of all protests since 2004". There was a dramatic surge in protests shortly after Jacob Zuma first took office and the number of protests was ten times higher in 2009 than in 2004 and even higher in 2010. The number of protests reached an all-time high in 2010/2011 and then a further all time post-apartheid peak in July 2012 with more protests occurring in the Western Cape than in any other province and just under half of all protests occurring in shack settlements. In early 2013 it was reported that popular protest had reached its highest rate since the end of apartheid in 2012. In early 2013 it was argued that there have been as many as 3,000 protests in the last four years.

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