Civil protest from the perspective of South African local government law

Abstract

One of the ideals of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 is to ensure developmental local government. Developmental local government is aimed at improvement of life in local communities and extends further than the provision of services. It denotes local government that is in tune with the needs of people. This requires municipalities to align its budget and planning structures to ensure that available resources are distributed to meet the needs and interests of their constituencies in pursuit of social and economic development. Municipalities must in principle also be able to deal with challenges as they appear without necessarily seeking assistance from national or provincial government. Local government serves the function of a public development agent and is therefore expected to be democratic and accountable and to sustainably provide services to all. Post-apartheid, various mechanisms, processes and procedures exist to involve local communities by means of public participation in public decision making. Despite the available mechanisms, the perception is that these mechanisms fail, which is why people resort to protest as a recourse to engage with local government effectively and meaningfully. This thesis is premised on the assumption that there is a growing tendency in South Africa for members of the community to resort to civil protest at the local level. The statistics show that despite various participatory mechanisms that exist for residents to inform local authorities of their needs and interests or to communicate discontent and dissatisfaction when authorities fail them, people elect to air their grievances thought protests. Accordingly, the aim of this thesis was to determine to what extent civil protest is justified from a South African local government perspective given that mechanisms exist in law to facilitate public participation and community involvement. The study reveals that civil protest has the inherent ability to complement the legal framework and the participatory mechanisms it provides. Protest action allows for a measure of direct public participation to those who might perceive the available participatory mechanisms as ineffective due to specific failures and the real/perceived unresponsiveness of public authorities.