Are there 30 service delivery protests a day in South Africa?

The destruction of shacks in Hammanskraal burning of schools in Vuwani have once more focused South Africa’s attention on so-called “service delivery protests”.

Most recently, the South African Broadcasting Corporation decided not to show footage of people burning public institutions like schools in any of its news bulletins. This sparked a formal complaint against the “ban”.

But just how many protests take place daily in South Africa?

A reader asked us on Twitter whether there are “30 service delivery protests a day as was said in parliament”.

She was referring to a question-and-answer session with President Jacob Zuma in May when a member of the United Democratic Movement opposition party, Mncendisi Filtane, began a question by saying that “South Africa records about 30 service delivery protests a day, every day”.

Africa Check managed to trace the source of the claim to the front page of Sunday newspaper City Press on 9 February 2014.

Above a picture of a raging fire engulfing an election poster, a banner read:

“2,947: the number of protests in SA in the last three months.”
“3,258: the total number of protests between January 2009 and August 2012”
“32: the number of protests a day in SA for the last three months.”

The claim then spread quickly.

South African journalist and columnist Max du Preez repeated the figure two days later in an opinion piece titled “Our protest culture is far from dead”.  Two days after that a The New York Times article also mentioned the number by saying that “the [South African] authorities have recorded a staggering 3,000 protest actions in the past 90 days. The unrest has become almost routine.”

Police records ‘not a protest database’

But as we explained in a report last year, South Africa’s police service does not record “service-delivery” protests.

When the police are called out to monitor and control crowds, the incidents are logged as “crowd-related incidents”. This category is very wide and covers situations varying from sport matches to electoral campaigns.

Crowd-related incidents are furthermore divided into “peaceful” or “unrest-related” events. However, this depends on whether the police had to intervene and not on the crowd’s intention or behaviour.

Police statistics showed that the police recorded 14,470 crowd-related incidents in 2014/15, the latest data available:

The number of crowd-related incidents that the police record “cannot be equated with protests”, researchers from the University of Johannesburg’s Social Change research unit wrote in a preliminary analysis of police data on crowd incidents released last year.

Project manager of the Crime and Justice Information and Analysis Hub at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Lizette Lancaster also thinks that the newspaper took all crowd-related incidents recorded for protests.

While the police incident recording system “can give some indication about the nature and number of protests… it is not a protest database”, Lancaster previously told Africa Check.

‘SA certainly doesn’t have 30 protests a day’

Post-doctoral fellow at the social change research unit, Dr Carin Runciman, told Africa Check that at present “there is no reliable estimate of the numbers of protests in South Africa”.

Conclusion: No data shows 30 service delivery protests a day in SA

The way that the South African police records events where they are called out to perform crowd control makes it near impossible to figure out how many of these were “service-delivery protests”. University researchers who looked at each entry between 1997 and 2013 concluded that it is nowhere near 30 a day, though.

There is therefore no evidence to support the claim that South Africa experiences 30 protests a day.

Article researched by Vinayak Bhardwaj and supplied by Africa Check. Follow them on Facebook and Twitter for more groundbreaking stories.