Yeah, burning stuff is cool, but have strikers tried really demanding respect?

Cool, so some people went on the rampage, burned some stuff  and to appease them, the government did some stuff so it can go back to normal for a few months.

It seems like this sequence of events is the norm now: get angry, make demands, cause some arbitrary damage and get a quick temporary fix.

This doesn’t sit well with me. But, of course, before we carry on and I get accused of being the middle class white boy trying to tell others how to express their pain and anger, this is not what this is about.

Really, this is about questioning the effects and consequences.

I’m not even bothered about the anger aspect. As far as I’m concerned, showing your anger is relevant.

One just cannot expect another to act accordingly because, frankly, I’m not convinced any MEC or minister cares about the anger of the people as long as a quick fix can be arranged.

I’m pretty certain this is what has led to such incomprehensible South Africanisms like “strike season”.

Seriously? Are we really okay anticipating there will be strikes every year because it’s just become normative?

It’s so exhausting and wastes so much time going through the same cycle year after year. Fortunately, we can isolate the reason behind it, which is quite simple.

Strikers are never respected.

So yeah if you burn things and don’t go to work for a few days, it will cost a couple of million, but once the strikers themselves are burned out, it will be easy to strike a deal and move on until next year. Fixing the scorched buildings will probably be cheaper, or even free with insurance, than meeting strikers’ demands initially, so it’s not like the people in charge will care.

They just need to get the strikers back to work eventually, so playing the game on those terms would be pretty easy if you can anticipate how much long term resolve the strikers have (typically not much) and when strike season will take place.

Knowing this though, striking workers have an upper hand and I’ve never understood why they don’t use it. It’s really frustrating because the ones who should feel the brunt of the strikers’ frustrations – y’know, the people with the power to make the changes – are hardly ever the ones in the firing line. They don’t personally pay for the damages.

Successful protests tend to have some form of direct relation to impact the decision maker responsible. In 1999, New York mayor Rudi Giuliani wanted to auction off community gardens to real estate developers – 198 of them.

Protestors responded by blocking off streets, filling them with dirt and planting plants to show the importance of gardens, so Giuliani relented. You haven’t heard of any mass selling of New York communal space since.

In 2018, protesting bus drivers in Japan kept working but didn’t take fares from passengers and their employers soon relented when they saw what an impact the drivers could have on the income stream in the long term. The same happened the year before in Sydney and in neither place has such a protest been necessary again since.

The obvious lesson is that as much as protestors understand their worth, they need to make that understanding clear to those in power in a manner that cements that worth into the zeitgeist. By doing that, we can avoid these constant strike seasons and focus on other important things.

No person in power will take any protest seriously if that protest has become just a matter of course.

When it comes to community service protest, there’s an extra bonus: communities are generally larger than they know and with the right leadership, banding together could often drive certain useless authorities to the point of irrelevance.

And when cash strapped municipalities are forced to do redundancy checks, the tables may turn to beg that community for a second chance.

I’m really not bothered about the tire burning angry shouting kind of protesting we find in South Africa. I’m just bothered by the notion people believe it’s going to change anything in the long term.

But, hey, if throwing faeces at a statue of Rhodes had an impactful change, it just goes to show how creative protesting goes a long way.

Richard Anthony Chemaly. Entertainment attorney, radio broadcaster and lecturer of communication ethics.