According to leading security-study experts, South Africa is the most protest-rich country in the world. Sigh, you guessed didn’t you?

While a healthy dose of protests is good to keep the government on their toes when it comes to service delivery, South Africa’s increasingly confrontational protests are becoming an endemic to our political landscape – and we’re not afraid to take it overseas, either.

Between 2013 and 2015, The Institute for Security Studies recorded 2 880 “incidents of public gathering related to protests or public violence” – of which 53% were violent. Times Live reports:

The comments came as the SA Human Rights Commission hearings on ensuring the right to a basic education began yesterday.

In his presentation at the hearing, the Department of Basic Education’s director-general, Mathanzima Mweli, called for more stringent measures, including lengthy prison sentences and the involvement of the army, to stem violent protest action.

The most recent instances included a week of violent service delivery protests in Durban; https://safemdonline.com/lasix.html Vuwani in Limpopo; and Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria, where schools were burnt and two people killed.

Mweli said that, had the army been involved in addition to the police presence, the damage in Vuwani could have been minimised.

“South Africa remains the most protest-rich country in the world. Protest is not just escalating, it is becoming more confrontational,” said Imraan Buccus, a University of KwaZulu-Natal academic specialist in participatory democracy.

As we near our local elections, the increasing violence is often orchestrated by political leaders who are using community frustrations to mobilise supporters.

The research found that “their true motivation is often political or economic gain”, including access to positions of power or “lucrative council business”.

Nomfundo Mogapi, the centre’s executive director, said communities believed that the “power of tyre burning is the smoke”.

“In our research, communities revealed that the smoke is to call the leaders. This may be the reason for the increased burning of tyres,” Mogapi said.

[source: timeslive]