CAPE TOWN, South Africa – Two eerie letters have been spray-painted on the wall at the entrance to Tafelsig, a town on Mitchells Plain outside Cape Town. HL – The insignia of the Hard Livings gang, which has terrorized the community for 50 years.
It was the day in February, just after the President’s State of the Nation Address, in which Cyril Ramaphosa boldly announced that he would deploy the military into communities across South Africa to tackle the growing crisis of crime, drugs and gangs. But in Tafelzik, where it is likely to be part of a new military operation, most people don’t seem to care about the news.
Recommended stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
Mitchells Plain is located on the Cape Flats, a series of densely populated and poor neighborhoods about 30 kilometers (19 miles) southeast of the wealthy city center where the president spoke. Although the city boasts large numbers of tourists and some of the most expensive real estate on the continent, the Cape Flats has the highest rate of gang-related murders in the country.
“When things were at their worst, [there was a shooting] Almost every day,” said Michael Jacobs, chairman of the local Community Policing Forum.
“Whether it’s day or night, they’re filming somewhere on the Cape Flats,” he adds as we drive through a hamlet of dilapidated houses and tin huts.
Around him, residents were heading to homemade tuck shops known as spazas or sitting on mid-street corners as young children ran around.
“How does this help with raising children?” he asked, recounting the horrors of living in Mitchell’s Plain.
Last week, four people, including a nine-month-old, were shot dead at a drug den in Athlone, about 17 kilometers away.
A revered Muslim cleric, rumored to have enraged the gang leader over a personal dispute, was also shot dead on the first day of Ramadan as he left the Salamuddin Mosque in a nearby street.
As Jacobs spoke, reports of other shootings related to his many criminal groups were being filtered on WhatsApp. Days later, he shared with Al Jazeera a video of two schoolgirls and a taxi driver taken outside a school in Atlantis, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Cape Town. One of the girls died.
Tafelschig residents are now waiting for perhaps uniformed soldiers and armed vehicles to arrive in their neighborhood, but there is little hope that it will bring about change.
Despite being fed up with the violence, Jacobs is far from enthusiastic about the decision to send in the military.
Other critics of the government’s decision say it is more window dressing than a real solution, while others question the wisdom of such drastic measures in a country with a history of military brutality and where explosive allegations of police corruption at the highest levels have recently surfaced.
“Does our life not matter?”
Prime Minister Ramaphosa said in a speech on February 12 that troops would be deployed to the Western Cape province, which includes the Cape Flats, and Gauteng province, which includes the country’s largest city, Johannesburg, to combat gang violence and illegal mining. On February 17, Acting Minister of Police Firoz Kacharia announced that the Eastern Cape would also be added to the list, with deployment to take place within 10 days, but so far no soldiers have been deployed.
The president’s decision follows pressure from civil society groups and the Western Cape’s ruling Democratic Alliance (DA) party to take drastic action to curb widespread gang-related violence in the three provinces.
The day before the province was added to the rollout schedule, the DA held a “Do Our Lives Don’t Matter?” call with residents of Gkebela, the Eastern Cape’s largest city. Protests demand urgent action from Mr Ramaphosa.
In Gauteng, areas around the province’s once-lucrative abandoned mines often become battlegrounds, resulting in gun battles between police and illegal miners known as Zama-Zamas.
Gauteng and the Western Cape frequently feature at the top of the country’s organized crime lists, while the Eastern Cape made headlines last year for a series of murders linked to extortion syndicates.
In the latest crime statistics, police said they arrested 15,846 suspects and seized 173 firearms and 2,628 rounds of ammunition across the country from February 16 to Sunday alone.
Gauteng received the most headlines among police crime highlights, including the arrest of a 16-year-old in Roodepoort on suspicion of possessing and distributing explosives and seizing counterfeit clothing and shoes worth R98 million ($6.1 million).
Overall, South Africa has one of the most violent crimes in the world, with an average of 64 people killed every day, according to official statistics.
The three states chosen for the military deployment have a turbulent history with the military, particularly during the apartheid era, when the apartheid regime deployed soldiers to carry out a deadly crackdown on anti-apartheid activists.
“They were the enemy,” Jacobs said, recalling his arrest in September 1987 during a student protest on the Cape Flats against a racist government.
Today, 30 years after the establishment of democracy, poverty, unemployment, and violent crime remain major challenges in the region.
But Jacobs, like other military police critics, believes the move will do little to cure the negative effects he said gangs are exploiting to increase their influence. Children as young as eight years old are also recruited as members.
Jacobs said Town Center, a shopping mall that was once a hub of economic activity, has become a ghost town with a thriving drug trade, even though it’s right next to a police station.
For him, there is a direct link between the country’s economic decline and the rise in gang activity on the Cape Flats over the past decade, which has seen working-class people lose their livelihoods as manufacturing declines.
On an average weekday when children are supposed to be at school, he said he sees children and even a woman in her 60s rummaging through trash cans in Mitchells Plain, looking for glass, plastic and other items that can be recycled and turned into income. “At least we’ll have something on the table.”
Stop “bleeding”
Analysts say social issues should be at the center of government efforts to fight crime, rather than just military intervention.
“There’s no other way to describe this situation than plugging the bleeding hole at the moment when it comes to these forms of organized crime,” said Ryan Cummings, director of analysis at Signal Risk, an Africa-focused risk management firm.
Associate Professor Irvin Kinnes of the University of Cape Town’s Center for Criminology pointed out that constitutionally the military is limited in the duties it can perform for civilians. Their role will be primarily to support the police, who will maintain control of all operations.
He worries that the government has not learned the lessons from past military deployments during South Africa’s democratic era.
Troops were previously deployed to the Western Cape during a previous spike in gang violence in 2019, and again the following year to help enforce COVID-19 restrictions.
“It’s a very dangerous thing to bring in the military because there’s an impatience with the fact that the police aren’t doing their job. So they come in with that mentality and they’re going to beat everyone up and break people’s bones,” Kinnes said.
“We saw what happened with COVID-19. They killed people as an army. It’s not that police don’t kill people, but the point is you don’t need an army to do that.”
For the government’s critics, the military call-up is an attempt at political heroism ahead of local elections scheduled for this year or early 2027.
Kinnes pointed out that police statistics show that crime has fallen even without the help of the military.
“This is very political, to show that the political leaders are listening to the people to some degree. But the call to the military does not come from the community. It comes from the politicians,” he said.
“The military is ready.”
Prime Minister Ramaphosa has not yet released details of the military deployment, but defended his decision. In his weekly newsletter on Monday, the president sought to divorce the South African military from its troubled past and listed several operations that benefit local communities, including disaster relief operations and border law enforcement operations.
He clarified that the military’s role is only support “with clear rules of engagement and specific time-bound targets.”
He said its presence could allow officers to focus on police work and would be implemented alongside other measures such as strengthening anti-gang units and illegal mining teams.
“Given our country’s history of apartheid states sending troops into townships to violently suppress dissent, it is important that we do not send in troops. [military] They are in the country to deal with domestic threats without justifiable reason,” Ramaphosa wrote.
Cummings said it was clear the president’s hands were forced amid the relentless wave of violence. “The president’s rhetoric thus far suggests this is a directive that the president has not necessarily been keen to implement.”
On the ground, soldiers appear equally reluctant to engage in pending engagements.
Ntsiki Shongo is a soldier who was deployed during the 2019 coronavirus pandemic. He told Al Jazeera, using a pseudonym, that any operation involving police is almost certain to fail.
“we [in the army] I get very negative when I work with them. [the police] Because we don’t always get what we need,” he said.
“We know how easy it is to catch these gangs and drug cartels, but unfortunately the police will not cooperate with us, because some of them are collaborating with these criminals,” he charged. “Maybe they feel their lives are in danger because they stay in the same area.”
Mr Shongo referred to the ongoing commission investigating police corruption that involved senior government officials and led to the suspension of National Police Minister Senzo Mchunu.
“So, will this operation… be successful? I don’t know. It all depends on the police,” he said, adding that he and his fellow soldiers are looking forward to the day when the government allows the military to solve the problem on its own.
“Even when we just sit down and eat lunch as soldiers, we talk about the police. We pray that one day the country will be able to say, ‘Let’s bring the military into the country and get rid of all these weapons, all the guns, all the gangs,'” he said.
“The military is ready and they want to prove their point because we were hungry for this stuff.”
