Voters hold the winning hand, but will they play it?

The frequency of service-delivery protests has increased by 96% since 2010, and they appear to occur most often in areas ''with high levels of fruitless and wasteful government expenditure", according to the Institute of Race Relations. The institute noted that 18% of the 176 large-scale protests recorded by Municipal IQ last year were in Eastern Cape and 21% in Gauteng, where avoidable costs of R768-million and R508-million respectively were racked up in the 2012-2013 financial year.