Every dozen officers deployed to hold a street is a dozen not doing anything that grows an economy. Security is necessary spending, and it is still spending that produces nothing.
As South African cities braced for anti-migrant protests, the visible response was public order: police mobilised, districts shuttered, private guards posted at premises that could afford them. The Financial Times set out how the unrest risks broader economic damage, and within that damage sits a line item that rarely gets tallied — the cost of containment itself.
The Diversion: Public Money Spent to Stand Still
Policing unrest is not free, and it is not additive. When officers are redeployed to protest containment, ordinary policing thins — investigations slow, routine patrols shrink, the baseline of order that commerce depends on gets stretched. The Treasury pays twice: once for the overtime, logistics and deployment, and again in the opportunity cost of public capacity pulled off its normal work.
This is the character of security spending as an economic input. It defends existing activity; it does not create new activity. A rand spent on a road builds a road. A rand spent on containing unrest, however justified, buys the absence of a worse outcome and nothing more. In national-accounts terms it registers as expenditure while producing no lasting asset.
Containment is the cost of a problem that was not governed upstream.
The Private Ledger: Security as a Tax on Operating
The public bill is only half of it. Firms in threatened districts carry their own containment costs, and these compound. Additional private guarding, hardened premises, insurance excesses and premium adjustments, staff transport arranged so people can get to work safely, hours lost to precautionary closure — each is a real outlay that shows up as a higher cost of doing business rather than as investment.
South Africa already carries one of the world’s heavier private-security burdens; the sector’s scale is itself a measure of the state capacity it substitutes for. Anti-migrant unrest adds a further, episodic layer on top of that structural one. For a spaza operator or a mid-sized manufacturer in Gauteng, this is money that could have gone to stock, wages or expansion, redirected to standing still safely.
Every security rand a firm spends is a growth rand it does not.
The Measurement: Making the Invisible Cost Visible
The reason this cost is under-managed is that it is diffuse and rarely aggregated. It hides across police budgets, municipal accounts, corporate opex and household spending, and no single figure captures it. That diffusion is precisely why it should be estimated deliberately.
A usable method treats security-response cost as a component of national productivity loss. On the public side: incremental deployment, overtime and logistics for unrest days, plus a proxy for diverted routine policing. On the private side: the delta in guarding, insurance and lost operating hours across affected districts. The figures will be estimates, and stated as such — but an estimate that captures the order of magnitude beats a precise silence. The point is to give policymakers and boards a number to weigh against the cost of governing migration properly in the first place.
What is not counted is easy to keep paying for.
The So-What: Quantify Containment as a Line Item
The intelligence angle is to move security-response cost from anecdote to accounting. For the state, that means treating containment spending as a measurable drag on productivity and setting it explicitly against the cost of orderly migration management — visa processing capacity at Home Affairs, documentation, functioning adjudication. Prevention is almost always cheaper than the standing cost of policing its absence.
For firms, it means putting a real figure on what unrest-related security is taking out of the operating budget each year, district by district, and carrying that number into location, insurance and investment decisions. A cost you can see is a cost you can argue about, budget against and, eventually, reduce.
Order maintained by force is order paid for in growth foregone. The bill should at least be read aloud.
