Anyone who follows the news will have read and heard about the recent series of ‘service delivery protests' around the country, including in the Western Cape. Most casual observers believe these protests signal a groundswell of dissatisfaction with ‘service delivery' - because that is how they have been reported in the press.
Sometimes this is true. But sometimes it isn't. Each 'service delivery' protest takes place in a specific context, and is driven by different agendas.
Last week, three vehicles were burnt during a so-called ‘service delivery' protest in Khayelitsha. Ironically, each of these vehicles was busy delivering a service to the community. One was delivering matric exam scripts to the marking centre. Another was fetching disabled people (for whom the City provides a special, subsidized transport system). A third was transporting children to a camp for abused children. The fourth vehicle escaped the blaze, but was stoned. It was an ambulance responding to an emergency call in the community.
It is beyond irony that services are destroyed in the name of service delivery protests.
In the television footage of these protests, further evidence of service delivery to the area was abundantly clear: tarred roads, storm water systems, overhead electricity wires, refuse bags awaiting collection (although their contents had been strewn across the street by protestors).
And in Khayelitsha's TR section (from which most of the protestors allegedly came) construction workers were being prevented from going onto site to build houses the people were supposedly demanding. In a nearby settlement, where an electricity sub-station was recently built, the local community is refusing to allow the electricity servitude to cross their land, thus preventing the City from supplying electricity to the surrounding shack settlements.