FOR the past few years the World Economic Forum has been giving SA the "gold medal" as the world’s most violent country in terms of labour-employer relations. Service delivery protests have also accompanied our new democracy since the late 1990s, with a spike since 2009 as recently reported by the South African Research Chair in Social Change at the University of Johannesburg.The Institute for Security Studies has recorded 2,880 protests in 2013-15, most of which turned violent. The University of Johannesburg researchers found an even higher occurrence of protests in 1997-2013, with a provisional tally at more than 67,000: an average of 11 riots per day.Overall, research confirms that violence has become endemic to our society. As we often hear on the streets, "violence is SA’s 12th official language and the only one everybody understands".Just over the past weeks, we have seen riots in Durban, in Vuwani (Limpopo) and in Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria, where schools were burnt and ...
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