(Illustration: Politically Aweh) For years, motorists travelling between Cape Town International Airport and the city centre have been the target of violent crime – earning that stretch of the N2 highway the grim nickname “the hell run”.
Following the murder of Karin van Aardt, a 64-year-old grandmother who was stabbed during a smash-and-grab just minutes from the airport in December 2025, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis announced the “N2 Edge Safety Project”: a R114-million intervention that includes, among other plans, an 8km concrete wall along the highway.
But is this actually about crime – or about what the City looks like to people flying in from abroad?
The crime on the N2 spills over from Cape Town’s poorer suburbs, communities that have faced the legacy of apartheid-era neglect and underinvestment in the democracy era.
The Politically Aweh team tracked down the receipts and academic insights to show why the City’s response seems both disproportionate and unlikely to curb crime.
The City’s own data shows that between July 2025 and January 2026, just 1% of all highway emergency calls were crime-related. The Nyanga police station, right next to the airport, meanwhile records more than 200 murders a year. Opponents say the wall addresses none of them.
Beyond the numbers, it’s what a “wall” represents in post-apartheid South Africa that the episode puts under the microscope.
Wits University professor of media studies, Dr Nicky Falkof, whose book Worrier State examines how fear operates as a political force in SA, puts it plainly: “A wall is never just a wall. It’s a symbol of class. It’s a symbol of status. It’s a way of defining an inside and an outside – which is fundamental to how race works in SA.”
This framing, inside and outside, seen and unseen, is at the heart of the criticism.
The project has attracted fierce backlash from activists and opposition parties. GOOD Party Secretary-General Brett Herron connects the wall directly to the apartheid spatial planning that created the problem in the first place.
“It’s not happening where it’s happening by coincidence,” he says. “It’s happening where people were forcefully removed under the Group Areas Act – in townships created by the apartheid state with deliberate underinvestment. You have to look at those conditions and say: we have to fix these.”
Violence prevention through urban upgrading
And he’s got a point: a 2020 study into Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading showed that improved lighting and community facilities in Khayelitsha reduced exposure to interpersonal violence in the area by 34%.
Crime in SA is deeply tied to structural issues: poverty, unemployment, inequality and a lack of access to basic services. A wall addresses none of these. But with local government elections looming, crime is on the ballot. And citizens want to be safe. Those who use the N2 and those who live alongside it.
The episode asks the question nobody in power seems to want to answer: Are we investing in solving crime and inequality – or just making it harder to see?
And if the mayor’s Instagram feed hasn’t sold you on the wall yet, the episode’s spicy parody advert might. As co-host Zoë Human says: “This exclusive eight kilometres of concrete ensures your smooth journey from the airport to the back of the queue at the Oranjezicht Farmer’s Market. Call us today to find out more. Unless you live in Khayelitsha — in which case don’t call. We don’t want to hear from you.” DM
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