Civil Strife against Local Governance: Dynamics of community protests in contemporary South Africa

[1] Chapter 1: Introduction: The dynamics of community protests in South Africa

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, in which notions of a liberal, democratic nationstate thrive, protests in South Africa can be seen as the defining experiences and political apparatus of modernity, shaping public spaces, discourse, and popular culture. As an ongoing and pervasive phenomenon, protests have also redefined the economic, social and cultural dynamics of communities in South Africa. It was not so long ago that as a nation, South Africa moved from a political system concerned with racial polarization, to a nation concerned with truth and reconciliation, to the present nation concerned with the consolidation of constitutional democracy or the so-called rainbow nation. Thus, the current nation is geared towards promoting democratic values, a pluralistic political dialogue and an environment conducive to citizen participation. But notably, protests, which have been a prominent feature of black political expression in South Africa for many years, have taken on a striking resonance. These protests, which have been thrust to the forefront of mainstream politics, are no more apparent than in the realms of local communities.

Globally the rise of insurgent citizenship has not only grown in quantity, but has also evolved in terms of mobilization and protest tactics in both democratic and authoritarian political settings. Buoyed by a wider range of organizational networks and the use of technology to mobilize, protests transcend geographical borders. Global forms of mobilization aimed at facilitating economic, social or political change can be traced to, for example, the tremendous accomplishment of Occupy Wall Street in the USA, the generalized rise in various forms of political protests in Latin American countries, communal conflicts in Sudan, Arab Spring revolutionary tactics in Egypt and Tunisia, and the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Scholars ascribe the rise of political protests in recent decades largely to the process of (post)modernization, which emphasizes how the individual’s values have radically changed their way of interacting with the political[2] system (Inglehart and Welzel 2009). This process triggered the reduction of political trust among citizens, while self-expression values gained priority, including the emergence of the so-called insurgent citizenship (Brancati 2014; Addler 2012; Inglehart and Catterberg 2002; Norris 1999).

The international discourse on sustained popular mobilization advances two competing views on the extent to which protests assist or impede democratization. In her book From Protest to Parties, Lebas (2011:14) argues that, to a large extent, scholars have viewed sustained popular mobilization as an impediment to democratization. Arguments advanced for this view are that popular demands can overwhelm weak states, reduce the flexibility of the actors who have the power to form pacts and make compromises, or trigger authoritarian retrenchment. This perspective, however, is challenged by several scholars who purport that sustained protests advance democracy and transform the character of state-society relations (Machado, Scartascini and Tommasi 2009; Runciman 2014).

The focus of this book is on community protests directed against municipalities in both predominantly black communities and white communities in South Africa. These protests are a daily reality for many South Africans and involve communities going on the rampage over the perceived provision of basic municipal services such as water, electricity, sanitation and other municipal obligations. This, inevitably, devolved into what I refer to as a civil strife (a sustained collective advocacy to address a concern). This strife against municipalities cuts across geographic and demographic boundaries, but, in what has become a somewhat hegemonic account by scholars, is the considerable attention given to community protests that often turn violent and at times deadly in predominantly black neighborhoods in South Africa. In contrast, the nonviolent protest tactic of refusing to pay rates and taxes directly to municipalities by ratepayers’ association in white communities, has received scant attention.

The book connects the critical issue of community protests to the equally precarious issue of political trust in local governance in South Africa by using comparative analysis of grassroots activism in predominantly black communities and predominantly white communities. Against this background, the book begins by asking several questions. Why, in an era of democratization, is South Africa experiencing such high levels of contestation between citizens and their local municipalities? In response to the question, this chapter provides a concise overview of the nature,[3] prevalence and dynamics of community protests in South Africa since 2004.

Why this book?

My interest in pursuing this book was triggered by two main events. First, it was the prime time television news which covered an unarmed protestor in Ficksburg (a typical large town in the Free State Province) being murdered by a number of police officers without provocation in April 2011. While not being the first unarmed person to have been murdered by the police in postapartheid South Africa, a decisive point was reached in respect of community protests in the country. This despicable act was rightly summed up Pithouse (2011:180) to conclude: they murdered a man who had, with thousands of others, taken to the streets in protest at the unconscionable contempt with which the poor are treated in this country.

Second, a headline of a newspaper I read in 2012 stated, "Children held to ransom for services". The report stated that about 17000 pupils in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa had been forced out of school for over four months (Nkosi 2012). The angry protestors from predominantly black communities cited a string of ‘broken promises’ by the government as their reason for protesting, and argued that the closing of schools was in the best interests of learners. I found it perplexing that parents could proactively prevent their own children from securing their future through education. Fast-forward to 2014, the so-called Northern Cape "No Road, No School" protest in Kuruman struck again and prevented learners from more than 50 schools from attending classes, thus, costing them a year of learning.

More specifically, the Olifantshoek/Kuruman cases represent some of the many intriguing cases of community protests in contemporary South Africa. These cases also represent a significant shift in community protests in the country: that public schools are being used as bargaining power in local struggles. For Jansen (2012), a key aspect of this shift is that such events had never happened before, even during the apartheid years. He further elaborates:

What kind of society closes down its schools for months on end because of demands for a tarred road and for the ejection of a single person, the mayor? Think about this for a minute. I am not contesting, for the moment, the legitimacy of the community’s[4] demands for better services or more competent officials. I am asking a broader question: why would a community sacrifice the one route out of poverty for rural youth in a socially and economically oppressed community like Olifantshoek and other areas of the Northern Cape? (Jansen 2012:2-3).

Another key shift in the nature of community protests involves their increasingly disruptive and violent character (Paret 2015). Scholarship has shown how community protest activists regularly move back and forth between institutional and non-institutional spaces of engagement and use violence to advance collective causes (Marais et al. 2008; Matebesi and Botes 2011; Steyn 2012). Furthermore, von Holdt (2013:590) provides another perspective on violence in South Africa by drawing attention to how inequality and economic exclusion, as well as the institutional challenges of a society in transition, produce a highly unstable social order in which violence is growing. He further argues that democracy may configure power relations in such a way that violent practices are integral to them – producing a social system we may call violent democracy (Von Holdt, 2013:590). As Tlhabi contends,

It is not the first time we have seen property being damaged by protesters and to pretend that this has never happened in our lives would be silly. But there are certain experiences that the heart cannot get used to. Like death. The trauma of having lost and buried a loved one does not make the situation easier to bear the next time someone else dies. And so it was that I joined fellow South Africans in expressing our horror at images of bloodthirsty residents throwing bricks at a former ward councilor’s house, ripping off the television satellite dish and, in the ultimate act of mob violence, setting a car on fire. These images were accompanied by angry voices threatening more violence and vowing to unleash further destruction. The visuals were not just reflective of residents who were fed up but rather, were a microcosm of the violent society in which we live (Tlhabi 2011:1).

As I was writing, a cursory glance at any article about protests in South Africa between the latter part of 2015 and early 2016 has been aptly dubbed the rise of fallism. Fallism, in this context, refers to the nationwide student and worker activism against lack of transformation and colonial legacies in tertiary institutions (Pilane 2015), conducted under banners such as #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, and #EndOutsourcing. These protests, although vastly different, have two things in common with mainstream community protests: the return to revolutionary catchphrases and the eroding of the public education system in the country. Moreover, these forms of student activism are largely shaped by what typically constitutes protest and what might be seen as effective tactics to advance protest goals.

These illustrative examples broadly highlight the fact that the current[5] wave of community protests in contemporary South Africa are as rampantly institutionalized and personally and socially detrimental to impoverished communities as apartheid was. There is a deeper issue here, however. Regardless of the explicit right to protest as enshrined in the South African Constitution (Republic of South Africa 1997), and regardless of the purported anger and frustrations of protest activists, a moral challenge remains for the country: Why have community protests not yet provoked, within the frameworks of a liberal-democratic society, any major moral outrage in South Africa?

The book is timely for three main reasons. Firstly, while the growth of international scholarly interest in protests has been substantial (Della Porta and Piazza 2008; Klandermans 1997; Lipsky 1965; Opp 2009; Swain. 2010), the upsurge in community protests in South Africa is matched by a growing, though limited, body of research investigating this phenomenon (Ballard, Habib and Valodia 2006; Booysen 2015; Booysen 2009; Brown 2015; Langa and von Holdt 2012; Piper and Nadvi 2010; Robins 2010, Tapscott 2010; Zuern 2011). While I applaud the insights and contributions of these studies, including the work of other leading private and university based research units, there remains a dearth of studies on the more subtle form of protest of withholding rates and taxes from municipalities, a tactic used by ratepayers’ association in predominantly white communities in South Africa. Thus, the book informs the growing literature on community protests and also fills an empirical void by including protests by residents’ associations both in predominantly black and predominantly white areas.

Secondly, with a few notable exceptions, the most striking and somewhat surprizing revelation to emerge about studies on community protests in South Africa is the ignorance of the voice of municipalities. Therefore, the book also focus on the narratives of municipalities, the Provincial Departments of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) and the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) (an independent organization mandated by the constitution to support local government).

Thirdly, the book seeks to make a modest contribution to the theory of political trust by drawing on an intricate three-dimensional theoretical framework of trust-institutions-actors, combined with insights from Karl-Dieter Opp’s (2009) structural-cognitive model (SCM). The SCM emphasizes the implicit link between macro-level political institutions and[6] motivations to participate in protest activities. For instance, the cognitive system of individuals, which includes identity and framing processes, is largely influenced by beliefs and attitudes towards formal political structures and processes. When relevant macro changes first enter the cognitive system of individuals, they set in motion cognitive processes that may create incentives to protest. These incentives include material as well as non-material costs (i.e. identity or identification with a group).

I use the metaphor of a swinging pendulum, where what I call a ravenous political trade-off between state and citizens, takes place along a continuum of political trust, with trust-building on the left end and distrust on the right end. The ravenous political trade-off constitutes the inherent conflict between the interests of politicians and citizens. To this end, the framework explicates how political trust, a cognitive function conceptualized as an individual’s confidence in state institutions (a local municipality, in this context), influences actors (citizens) to engage in protest action. While political trust functions as a linkage mechanism between citizens and the political institutions that represent them (Kong 2014), the framework suggests that it is the structure of the community groups that motivates community groups with a fundamentally set of similar grievances to embark on miscellaneous protest tactics.

The book will also be centrally relevant to racially polarized postconflict and post-liberation countries with longstanding and highly institutionalized states. Deepening our understanding of protests at community level may lead to a determination of how an effective trustbuilding intervention strategy should be approached. This will go a long way in repairing the ever-growing gulf of distrust between state and non-state actors and, as a result, halt the strife against local governance. To this end, three primary questions underlying the book are: How are community protests socially constructed and rendered meaningful at collective level? What elements of the social fabric enable communities to sustain mobilization against their local municipalities? What incentives motivate civic groups with a fundamentally similar set of grievances to embark on different protest tactics?

[7] Community protests: some conceptual clarity

A large body of literature has been devoted to the concept of protest - a central aspect in the study of social movements. These studies have shown that protests are dynamic and characterized by great complexity. Broadly, protests are defined as a resource of the powerless … [who] depend for success not upon direct utilization of power, but upon activating other groups to enter the political arena (Lipsky 1965: 1). In this regard, collective action is arguably the most defining characteristic that differentiates protests from other forms of political behavior such as voting. But a universal definition of the concept community protests is still elusive. The media, government and some scholars still use the term service delivery protests to illuminate the demands of residents. For example, Booysen (2007:21) described these protests broadly as being led against both the quality of service delivery and public representation of grass-roots’ service delivery needs.

But for others, the notion of service delivery protests not only blurs the debate, but also ignores the wider context of the issue (Friedman 2009; Pithouse 2011). For them, the issue encompasses much more than just the provision of basic services. A further linguistic challenge about the term is despite being pervasive in the political discussions of South Africa (Le Chen et al. 2014), service delivery is not universally defined (Stewart 2013). Furthermore, conceptions of the protest action as a way in which the use of violence is viewed as a natural and justified response by various actors (Von Holdt 2011), an effect of neoliberal economic policies in post-apartheid South Africa (Alexander 2010; Runciman 2014, Swart 2013), or a rebellion of the poor (Alexander 2010), are grounded in the precarious living conditions of black South Africans (Stewart 2013) and assist in understanding the dichotomy between community grievances and protests.

More recent scholarship, though, has also contributed much to the divergence in definitions of protest action. For instance, Powell, O’Donovan and de Visser (2015:4), describe the protest action as civic protests that refer to organized protest action within a local area which directly targets municipal government or targets municipal government as a proxy to express grievances against the state more widely. The authors allude that the definition of the protest action as a form of civic conflict is useful in locating the South African experience within the broader field of comparative[8] international scholarship on conflict in fragile and conflict affected countries. Conversely, others generally delineate the protest action as a form of community protest. For example, Paret notes:

Community protests refer to collective actions that take place within a highly localised geographic area, such as an informal shack settlement or a section of a township. They are popularly labelled as ‘service delivery protests’, in reference to common demands for services such as water and electricity… (Paret 2015:121).

The aforementioned conceptual innovations by Paret (2015) and Powell et al. (2015) elicit both similarities and differences. For instance, one key element in both definitions is the emphasis on the fact that the protest action typically takes place in a highly localized area. However, only Powell et al. (2015) mention municipalities as the target of the protestors, whereas Paret (2015) explicitly focuses on residents’ common demands: water and electricity.

The definition by Powell et al. (2015) is a valid point of reference to shift from the focus on the term of service delivery protests to community protests. In this regard, I extend the two definitions by describing the protest action as collective action by residents in a highly localized area (community), which directly targets a local municipality over the provision of basic services such as water, electricity, and sanitation, including a wider spectrum of concerns such as housing, roads, government corruption, rampant crime, and unemployment.

It is this concept of community protests that underlies this book. It highlights one key broad aspect that characterizes the definition of community protests: that the protest action takes place within social contexts. Thus, community protests are defined on the basis of the often taken-for-granted dynamics of local government participatory governance. Furthermore, the concept embodies a new orientation toward the responsibility of municipalities in post-apartheid South Africa.

Tracing the inner logic of official state rhetoric on community protests reveals, in the words of the South African President, that in some cases people protested against municipalities even if the issues at hand did not fall under their mandate (News24 2014a). In hindsight, this seems to be an eminently sensible general analysis about the issue. However, this notion of community protests is highly untenable and may generate misguided policy and intervention responses. Such views are also not sensitive enough to the profound complexities of constructive engagement between municipalities (or broadly, the state) and local residents.

[9] For instance, the emphasis on participatory governance in post-apartheid South Africa has been linked to substantive innovations in public participation. One such innovation included a set of requirements for public involvement in various decision-making processes similar to those in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. These requirements, among others, include public consultation on the annual municipal budget, the integrated development programme (IDP) review process, and the service delivery contracting process (Barichievy, Piper and Parker 2005; Booysen 2009; Mubungizi and Dassah 2014; Piper and Nadvi 2010). This local participatory planning process, as in the case of Brazil, France and Spain (Ganuza, Nez and Morales 2014), is particularly prone to community protests. Evidence from several case studies in South Africa has shown that residents often identify a lack of housing, poor roads, and sewage systems as development priorities during IDP meetings (Botes et al. 2007; Johnston and Bernstein 2007). I contend that once the local municipality agrees to these priorities and includes them in the IDP, is it therefore not logical to assume that residents will approach municipalities should these needs and concerns not be addressed at a later stage? As I explain later in the book, IDPs (or participatory budgeting in international discourse) have become a contentious issue on whether municipalities implement them because it is normatively desirable to do so, or for the very practical reasons of achieving better municipal performance.

Local governance in South Africa

There is substantial literature on the local government system in general, and municipalities in particular, in South Africa. This sub-section is concerned, therefore, with an overview of the performance of municipalities, and not with providing an exhaustive account of local governance in the country.

Over the past few decades, many studies on the notion of democratic local governance were conducted in a variety of contexts in South Africa (Lobe 2008; Mohamed 2000; Patel 2006; Pillay 2001; Tshabalala and Lombard, 2009). The surge in the number of studies on local governance was largely as a result of the major reforms and new institutional mechanisms aimed at promoting the engagement of local elected leaders with their respective communities (Tshabalala and Lombard, 2009). Prior to the new[10] political dispensation in South Africa, local government had little autonomy, and decisions were subject to judicial review by provincial and national governments (South African Local Government Association 2013). This period, characterized by wide-ranging popular mobilization against the apartheid government, was later followed by an era that coincided with the growing expectations of public consultation and articulation between popular needs and government action (Booysen 2009) from South African citizens.

It