Protests are still presented as unusual events - the media insists that there has been a “wave of protest” triggered by the election campaign But ...
Poor township conditions do not justify another way of denigrating the poor favoured by media and politicians – explaining protests away as “service delivery protests”.
The term “service delivery” is deeply undemocratic. It implies that the role of citizens in a democracy is to wait while those in government who know better “deliver” to them. The democratic view is that everyone is entitled to an equal say in the decisions which affect them – including a say in how government serves them. The “service delivery” explanation reduces citizens to people who benefit or suffer from decisions over which they have no control.
More important, the “service delivery” cliché doesn’t describe why people protest. The issues vary but, in each case, people are saying that their views and needs are ignored – that they have no voice. They don’t want government to “deliver” to them, they want it to listen to them. Journalists often say people are engaged in a “service delivery protest” because they cannot be bothered to ask them why they are protesting.None of this means that the ANC is the victim of injustice.
What it does show is that the default position of the mainstream is to denigrate poor people. They are courted at election time and noticed when their protests spill out of townships, affecting the lives of the insider minority who monopolise public life. For the rest, the insiders who dominate debate claim regularly that everything they do favours poor people – but never ask the poor what they favour. And, when poor people are persuaded by local organisers or ambitious politicians that they have an opportunity to be heard by taking to the streets, they are reduced by the insiders to passive consumers of “delivered” services or pawns in the hands of agitators.
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