There seems to be a protest a day in South Africa. As peo­ple take to the streets to protest the slow work of the gov­ern­ment there, some­times the protests grow vio­lent. The demon­stra­tions have been a big part of South African Pres­i­dent Jacob Zuma first 100 days in office.

This analy­sis from today’s Finan­cial Times shows how the demon­stra­tions have effected Zuma’s start as President.

A hail of stones greets the two armoured cars as they rum­ble past the tree trunks, con­crete blocks and burn­ing tyres that lit­ter the main road in Thokoza, an impov­er­ished black town­ship a dozen or so miles south-east of Johan­nes­burg. Police­men wear­ing riot hel­mets, their rifles primed with rounds of rub­ber bul­lets, jump out and for the next hour or so play cat and mouse with demon­stra­tors mainly in their teens and 20s.

Most of the youths are armed with sticks, batons or sjam­boks (rawhide whips) and since first light they have been out on the streets protest­ing against depri­va­tion and the area’s dis­mal pub­lic services.

Scenes like this are becom­ing ever more com­mon across South Africa as Pres­i­dent Jacob Zuma – who on Mon­day com­pletes his first 100 days in office – strug­gles to con­tain a wave of com­mu­nity protests and labour dis­putes. In the last month alone, strik­ing munic­i­pal work­ers have dumped rub­bish in the streets of the big cities; work on new soc­cer sta­di­ums, rail­ways and power plants stopped for a week as tens of thou­sands of con­struc­tion work­ers downed tools; and wild­cat action by doc­tors halted nor­mal ser­vice in pub­lic hospitals.

Barely a day goes by with­out a protest some­where as the poor fret at the absence of improve­ments promised by Mr Zuma ahead of April’s elec­tion. “It is so slow,” says Bon­gani San­tos, 33, a mem­ber of the rul­ing African National Congress’s youth league in Thokoza.

“Peo­ple feel dis­sat­is­fied,” says William Gumede, a Johan­nes­burg ana­lyst. “The elec­tion cam­paign whipped up expec­ta­tions and increased people’s impa­tience. There has clearly not been a long honeymoon.”

Mr Zuma, who won a land­slide vic­tory and promised to make the fight against poverty a cor­ner­stone of his admin­is­tra­tion, denies that the protests amount to a pat­tern of “national unrest”, argu­ing that “we should not claim these events to be more than they are”. Nev­er­the­less, the ten­sions of recent weeks have begun to stain what in some ways has been a solid and opti­mistic begin­ning by his government.

In office, Mr Zuma has been more prag­matic polit­i­cally than many expected. Fears that he would back the poli­cies favoured by the left­wing allies that sup­ported him in a long power strug­gle with Thabo Mbeki, Nel­son Mandela’s suc­ces­sor as pres­i­dent, have proved exag­ger­ated. Impor­tant min­is­te­r­ial appoint­ments – such as the nom­i­na­tion of Pravin Gord­han to the Trea­sury and the reten­tion in the cab­i­net of Trevor Manuel, for­merly finance min­is­ter and now in the poten­tially pow­er­ful posi­tion of plan­ning min­is­ter, have been wel­comed in the pri­vate sector.

Finan­cial mar­kets also applauded the more recent deci­sion to bring Gill Mar­cus to head the South African Reserve Bank. Ms Mar­cus is a for­mer deputy both to Mr Manuel and to Tito Mboweni, the cen­tral bank’s out­go­ing gov­er­nor, and is chair of Absa, one of the country’s biggest com­mer­cial banks. Other cru­cial posi­tions have been filled quickly. For exam­ple, Mr Zuma named a new national police com­mis­sioner as soon as he was legally able to do so. The post had remained open since Mr Mbeki sus­pended its pre­vi­ous occu­pant early last year, an absence of lead­er­ship that did not help the fight against a high rate of vio­lent crime.

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