Root cause of protests
I HAVE come to understand protests over service delivery as a mechanism through which marginalised communities de-legitimise non-performing leaders.
The association of violence and protest reflects deep-seated fits of anger and frustrations of vulnerable community members, recently exacerbated by the scourge of Covid-19 pandemic, corruption, and the absence of leadership in the area.
It then makes it easy to think of service delivery protests as violent, spontaneous, unco-ordinated demonstrations of people consumed by a sense of entitlement to free services.
Alternatively, maybe, there exists another dimension, where service delivery protests are a mechanism of
