Militarisation won’t solve Cape Flats violence — structural justice is essential for true change

When the President announced the deployment of the South African National Defence Force to the Cape Flats to combat gangsterism, the announcement was framed as decisive action against entrenched violence. In communities where children instinctively drop to the floor at the sound of gunfire, the appeal of decisive action is understandable.

The state has an unequivocal duty to secure life and dignity. Where organised criminal networks operate with territorial control and lethal capacity, inaction would be a constitutional failure.

But militarisation, however forceful, is not transformation.

South Africa has deployed securitised interventions in gang-affected communities before. These operations may temporarily suppress visible violence. They may disrupt networks, confiscate weapons and reassert state presence. Yet history shows that once deployments end, violence often reconstitutes itself, sometimes in altered, more adaptive forms.

This is because gangsterism in the Cape Flats is not simply a policing deficit. It is a structural condition.

Violence as structural continuity

The Cape Flats remains shaped by spatial apartheid design, communities built through forced removals, engineered economic marginalisation and systematic underinvestment. These neighbourhoods were never merely residential zones; they were containment zones.

Within such environments, gang networks thrive not because they are culturally inevitable, but because they embed themselves into social vacuums:

• Youth unemployment and blocked mobility pathways;
• Under-resourced schools and high dropout rates;
• Substance economies that replace legitimate opportunity;
• Prison systems that function as gang recruitment and consolidation sites; and
• Fractured trust between residents and state institutions.

Militarisation addresses manifestation. It does not address causation.

If the state treats gangsterism as an external enemy to be subdued rather than a social rupture to be repaired, interventions risk becoming cyclical, dramatic, visible, but ultimately temporary.

The constitutional project requires more

South Africa’s constitutional order is transformative in design. It does not seek mere order; it seeks structural redress.

Section 1 of the Constitution commits the state to dignity, equality and freedom. These are not abstract aspirations. They impose a duty to confront the social architecture that reproduces violence.

In historically marginalised communities, neutrality is insufficient. Equality requires repair.

This is where restorative justice becomes relevant, not as sentimental leniency, but as an institutional strategy. Restorative models focus on rebuilding relationships, restoring legitimacy, centring victims and interrupting the social pipelines that produce repeat violence.

The military can secure a perimeter. It cannot reconstruct legitimacy.

The risk of normalised emergency

There is also a deeper institutional concern. Repeated military deployments into civilian spaces risk normalising a state of exception. When communities experience state presence primarily through armed patrols, legitimacy becomes transactional rather than relational.

Children raised under recurring militarisation internalise a powerful message: that their neighbourhood is a battlefield rather than a polity.

That message undermines the very social cohesion that durable safety requires.

A structural alternative

The question is not whether the state should act. It must. But decisive action requires design.

A transformative response would combine stabilisation with deliberate structural reconstruction:

• Immediate suppression of high-level gang coordination;
• Targeted youth diversion mechanisms to interrupt recruitment;
• Community-based restorative forums anchored in schools, faith institutions and civic structures;
• Localised mediation platforms to prevent escalation of retaliatory violence; and
• Reintegration frameworks for individuals exiting prison gang systems.

Such measures are not soft. They are preventive. They recognise that sustainable safety is built through social reconstruction, not episodic force.

Beyond the politics of strength

Calls for military deployment are often framed as demonstrations of strength. Yet true state strength lies not only in the ability to deploy force but also in the capacity to design durable solutions.

Militarisation may create breathing space. But breathing space must be used to rebuild the social fabric that violence has torn.

Otherwise, we risk rehearsing a familiar cycle: deployment, temporary calm, withdrawal, resurgence.

The crisis in the Cape Flats demands urgency. But urgency without structural imagination is repetition.

Transformation requires more than force.

It requires repair. DM

Nathanael Siljeur is a legal practitioner and researcher with a background in constitutional law, social justice and ethics. He writes in his personal capacity.