“The soldiers are here, and we’re happy,” Nyanga Community Policing Forum (CPF) chairperson Martin Makasi told a packed room at the Lentegeur police station in Mitchells Plain on Wednesday 28 August.

Makasi’s sentiment was echoed by other community safety representatives at a briefing intended to help MPs assess the impact of the deployment of the SANDF to gang hot spots on the Cape Flats.

“We appreciate the presence of the army,” veteran Elsies River activist Imran Mukkadam said. “In our community, it has sent a new message of hope.”

From the SANDF’s side, too, the conviction was expressed that the army deployment, code-named Operation Prosper, is having a positive impact.

Colonel Keith Aarons sketched the context of the troops’ arrival on the Cape Flats on the weekend of 19 July.

“Using deception and surprise, we deployed in Manenberg,” he said. “It is my humble opinion that that weekend, we saved some lives in Manenberg.”

CPF members murmured their agreement.

But there has been little consensus on how to measure the impact of the troops’ deployment in empirical terms. Earlier in August, Police Minister Bheki Cele hailed the fact that more than 1,000 arrests have been made so far as evidence of the progress in restoring stability to the area.

The Western Cape government, relying on mortuary figures, has pointed out that after an initial drop, murder rates on the Cape Flats have risen once again.

The day before the briefing at the Lentegeur police station, seven people were killed in three shootings in Siqalo, Samora Machel and Delft.

But Aarons was adamant: “There was an initial decrease [in violence]. There is a stabilisation.”

Part of the problem has been that very little information has been forthcoming from the SANDF on its troops’ activities, with Western Cape Premier Alan Winde telling Daily Maverick in mid-August that the provincial government was “not privy to any operational information”.

Aarons admitted on Wednesday that the lack of communication was a tactical error.

The colonel said that by imposing a “media blackout”, authorities had “continued this negative narrative and influenced the public wrongly [to believe] that this operation is not working”.

This time around, the SANDF provided some more concrete information on what its troops have been doing.

The focus has been on maintaining security from Thursday evenings to Sunday evenings, Aarons said, because this period is traditionally the most volatile in the ganglands.

During the week, “preventative operations” have been taking place, with soldiers manning vehicle checkpoints, providing protective cordons for police to carry out searches, administering roadblocks, carrying out foot and vehicle patrols with cops, and engaging in “overt intelligence gathering”.

The latter, Aarons explained, referred to the scenario where “Mrs X comes to the corporal and says: ‘You are at the wrong house’.”

But Aarons also conceded that the joint operations have faced many difficulties and have been dealing with inadequate resources.

On his wish-list, he placed more urban surveillance teams, more canine units, drones, and metal detectors – because “astute gangsters are hiding weapons underground”.

On the operational side, Aarons said that a delay in obtaining warrants meant weapons often disappeared before they could be seized. He also cited problems with the criminal justice sector, including that there are currently “no concrete plans to isolate known gang-affiliated members who are on trial [from other prisoners]”.

Primarily, however, the colonel expressed the belief that Operation Prosper could have only limited impact as long as the buy-in from other government departments remained virtually non-existent.

“There is no concrete or visible plan by the Department of Social Development to address the social fabric,” Aarons said.

Neither is there an attempt to foster the development of peaceful conflict resolution skills: “In the Cape Flats, the way to address a problem is with violence, finish en klaar.”

Despite the CPF representatives’ general appreciation of the army’s presence, they too raised concerns. One was about the release of awaiting-trial gang members on parole.

Another was the accusation that the joint operations have been focusing on “soft targets”, such as cracking down on shebeens.

“Your focus should be drugs and guns,” Mitchells Plain CPF secretary Lynn Phillips told the assembled military figures.

But the major shadow hanging over the room was expressed by Elsies River’s Mukkadam, who wanted to know what happens when the army leaves. “Where is social services, the education department, all the people who should be making a difference on the ground?” he asked.

To loud applause, he concluded: “We request the presence of the army be extended because we don’t believe their work is done yet.”

Nyanga’s Makasi made the same appeal: “We seriously need to consider to extend that deployment.”

Earlier, Aarons had expressed his own desire for the number of troops to be increased and the deployment extended for at least nine months.

Yet Cele reiterated the temporary nature of the deployment earlier in August, saying that while authorities would not rule out sending the army back at a later stage, “police need to be ready for life once the SANDF has been withdrawn”.

Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula was singing from the same hymn sheet in Parliament this week, reminding MPs that “the South African National Defence Force was never designed or aimed to be utilised internally.”

The fear expressed by community members on Wednesday was that when the troops ship out, the murderous business of gangsterism will simply resume as normal – in the absence of any new social or economic interventions to change the status quo while the soldiers have been in position.

Considering the idea that things could change within three months, Makasi asked: “Are we dreaming?” DM