Once again, soldiers are being sent into the Cape Flats. Once again, armoured vehicles roll through working-class neighbourhoods. Once again, politicians promise that this time, things will be different.
We have seen this movie before, and we know how it ends: With ample room for sequels…
In July 2019, under “Operation Lockdown”, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) was deployed to curb gang violence. For a brief moment, shootings declined. Streets fell quiet. Government congratulated itself.
Then the soldiers left.
And the violence returned. Because it always does.
Gang violence does not disappear when the army arrives. It goes underground. It watches, waits, re-calculates, re-strategises – and then the soldiers leave.
This is not real peace. It is a temporary pause.
Same rights for Cape Flats
People living on the Cape Flats have the same rights as people living in Camps Bay or Claremont to go about their daily lives without fear for their safety. Children have the same rights to learn and to grow.
Forcing Cape Flats residents to live either in a gang zone or under intermittent military occupation does not afford them their rights. It underscores the societal prejudice against them that led to their being forcibly removed and dumped there in the first place.
Read more: Ramaphosa’s decision to deploy the SANDF is deeply flawed. Here’s why
President Ramaphosa’s deployment of the SANDF against gangsterism overlooks critical issues, revealing the military's struggle against neglect and underfunding while failing to tackle the root causes of crime.
Gangs are a symptom of a disease that the army is unqualified to treat.
They are a symptom of chronic unemployment, collapsing schools, overcrowded housing, broken public services, inadequate psycho-social support, and a political system that has normalised abandonment.
They are what grows when government shows no concern for certain groups of the population, and young people are left to fend for themselves.
Yet, every time the crisis becomes too visible to ignore, the state reaches for the same blunt instrument conclusion: militarisation.
This is not bold leadership. It is recycled failure.
Sending soldiers into the Cape Flats is like putting a plaster on a gunshot wound. Like putting lipstick on a pig.
The SANDF doesn’t build schools. It doesn’t hire teachers. It doesn’t intervene in drug addiction. It doesn’t re-imagine apartheid spatial planning. It doesn’t make housing more dignified or affordable. It doesn’t restore dignity.
Guns don’t do social policy, and boots don’t replace justice.
When gangs flourish
Gangs flourish where the state has lost control. In many communities, they have become employers, lenders and power brokers because government has been absent. Years later, that same government arrives in camouflage and declares war on the consequences of its own neglect.
Every sphere of government bears responsibility for this failure. National, provincial, and local authorities have all fallen short. And when they do, they hide behind uniforms and press conferences. The concern on their faces as temporary as the military presence, itself.
We do not need more troops. We need a state that works. A state that says regardless of the financial status of their parents, children who grow up on the Cape Flats are equal to those growing up in Camps Bay or Claremont.
Gangs are not the disease. The disease is an uncaring, unstrategic and uncreative state.
Until we treat this disease, inequality, exclusion and broken governance, we’ll just keep replaying the same old story.
Different uniforms. Same failure. Same ending. DM
Brett Herron is a founding member of the Good Party, which contested the 2019 general elections just three months after its launch. He serves as the Good party’s Secretary-General.