‘A dangerous thing’: South Africa’s gang-ridden townships fear army deployment | Military News

Cape Town, South Africa – Two ominous letters have been spray-painted on a wall at the entrance to Tafelsig, a township in Mitchells Plain on the outskirts of Cape Town: HL – the badge of the Hard Livings gang that has been threatening communities there for five decades.

It is a February day shortly after the president’s State of the Union address, in which Cyril Ramaphosa boldly announced he was going deploy the army to communities across South Africa to tackle the growing crisis of crime, drugs and gangs. But in Tafelsig, which is likely to be part of the new military operation, most people don’t seem bothered by the news.

Mitchells Plain is on the Cape Flats – a series of densely populated, impoverished townships about 30 km (19 miles) south-east of the wealthy city center where the president made his speech. While the city boasts hordes of tourists and some of the most expensive real estate on the continent, the Cape Flats are responsible for the highest rate of gang-related murders in the country.

“When it was at its worst, (there was a shooting) almost every day,” said Michael Jacobs, the chairman of a local community policing forum.

“Whether it’s day or night, they’re shooting somewhere on the Cape Flats,” he added on a drive through the settlement of dilapidated houses and tin huts.

Around him, residents made their way to a homemade snack, known as a spaza, or sat on street corners while toddlers ran around.

“How is it conducive to raising children?” he asked, recounting the horrors of life in Mitchells Plain.

In the past week, four people, including a nine-month-old, were shot dead in a drug den in Athlone, about 17km (10 miles) away.

A beloved Muslim cleric who allegedly angered a gang leader over a personal dispute was also shot dead on the first day of Ramadan as he left the Salaamudien mosque in a nearby street.

As Jacobs spoke, reports of other shootings filtered through to the many crime groups he is part of on WhatsApp. A few days later, I shared a video with Al Jazeera of two schoolgirls and a taxi driver being shot outside a school in Atlantis, about 40km (25 miles) north of Cape Town. One of the girls is dead.

Tafelsig residents are now awaiting the likely arrival of uniformed soldiers and armed vehicles in their neighborhood, but have little hope that it will make a difference.

Despite his weariness with the violence, Jacobs is far from enthusiastic about a decision to deploy the military.

Other critics of the government’s decision said it was more than a real fix, while some questioned the wisdom of such a drastic move in a country where the military has a history of brutality and where recent explosive allegations of police corruption at the highest levels have emerged.

“Do our lives not matter?”

In his speech on February 12, Ramaphosa said he would deploy the army to the Western Cape, the province that includes the Cape Flats, and Gauteng, home to the country’s largest city, Johannesburg, to tackle gang violence and illegal mining. On February 17, Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia announced that the Eastern Cape would be added to the list and a deployment would take place in 10 days – although no soldiers have been deployed so far.

The president’s decision followed pressure from civil society groups and the Democratic Alliance (DA) party, which governs the Western Cape, to take drastic steps to curb widespread gang-related violence in the three provinces.

A day before his province was added to the deployment schedule, the DA joined residents in Gqeberha, the largest city in the Eastern Cape, for a “Do our lives matter?” protest to demand that Ramaphosa act urgently.

In Gauteng, neighborhoods around the province’s once-profitable abandoned mines have often been turned into battlegrounds, leading to shootouts between the police and illegal artisanal miners, known as zama zamas.

Gauteng and the Western Cape regularly appear 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, the police announced the arrests of 15,846 suspects nationwide and the seizure of 173 firearms and 2,628 rounds of ammunition from February 16 to Sunday alone.

Gauteng took the most place in the police crime highlights, which included a 16-year-old arrested in Roodepoort for possession and distribution of explosives and the seizure of counterfeit clothes and shoes worth 98 million rand ($6.1 million).

Overall, South Africa has some of the world’s most violent crime with an average of 64 people are killed every dayaccording to official statistics.

The three provinces selected for military deployment have a turbulent history with the armed forces, not least during the apartheid era when the regime used soldiers to unleash a deadly crackdown on anti-apartheid activists.

“They were the enemy,” Jacobs said, recalling his own arrest in September 1987 during a student protest on the Cape Flats against the racist government, which was replaced in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.

Today, after three decades of democracy, poverty, unemployment and violent crime remain a major challenge in the area.

But Jacobs, like other critics of the military police, believes the new move will do little to cure the ills he said gangs are exploiting to increase their influence. Children as young as eight years old are recruited into their ranks.

The Town Center, a shopping mall that was once a hub of economic activity, has been reduced to a ghost town where the drug trade thrives despite being right next to a police station, according to Jacobs.

For him, there is a direct link between the country’s economic decline and the rise of gang activity over the past decade in the Cape Flats, where working-class people have seen their livelihoods stripped away as the manufacturing sector has shrunk.

On an average weekday when children have to be at school, he said, you see children and even women in their 60s in Mitchells Plain digging through bins to find glass, plastic or other things they can recycle and turn into an income. “At least it will put something on the table.”

Stop ‘bleeding’

Social issues and not simply military intervention should be placed at the heart of the government’s anti-crime efforts, say analysts.

“There’s no other way to describe it other than plugging a hole that’s bleeding right now with respect to these forms of organized crime,” said Ryan Cummings, director of analytics at Signal Risk, an Africa-focused risk management firm.

Irvin Kinnes, an associate professor at the University of Cape Town’s Center for Criminology, pointed out that the military is constitutionally limited in the duties its members may perform among the civilian population. Their role will largely be to support the police, who will retain control of all operations.

He fears the government has not learned lessons from previous military deployments in South Africa’s democratic era.

The military was sent to the Western Cape in 2019 during a previous spike in gang violence and was sent in 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 police not doing their job. And so they come in with that mentality and want to beat everybody up and break people’s legs,” Kinnes said.

“We saw what happened in COVID. They killed people like the military. It’s not like the police don’t kill people, but the point is, you don’t need the military to do that.”

For the government’s opponents, the call-up of the army is nothing more than an attempt at political heroism ahead of local elections to be held this year or early in 2027.

Kinnes pointed out that, according to police statistics, crime has decreased without the help of the military.

“It’s very political. It’s to show that the political leaders kind of listened to the public. But the call for the army didn’t come from the community. It came from politicians,” he said.

‘The army is ready’

Ramaphosa, who has yet to reveal details about the military deployment, defended his decision. In his weekly newsletter on Monday, the president sought to separate the South African armed forces from their troubling past, listing various operations that have benefited communities, such as disaster relief efforts and law enforcement operations at the border.

He made it clear that the army’s role would be merely a supporting role “with clear rules of engagement and for specific time-bound objectives”.

Its presence could free up officers to focus on police work and would come alongside other measures, such as strengthening gang units and illegal mining teams, he said.

“Given our history, where the apartheid state sent the army into townships to violently suppress opposition, it is important that we do not deploy the (military) within the country to deal with domestic threats without good reason,” Ramaphosa wrote.

Cummings said it was clear the president’s hand was forced amid an unrelenting wave of violence. “The rhetoric from the president so far suggests that this was an order that he wasn’t necessarily too eager to implement.”

On the ground, soldiers seem equally hesitant about their pending engagement.

Ntsiki Shongo is a soldier deployed in 2019 and during the COVID-19 pandemic. He told Al Jazeera, using a pseudonym, that any operation involving the police was almost certainly doomed.

“We (in the army) get so negative when we work with them (the police) because we always don’t get what we need,” he said.

“We know how easy it is to get these gangsters, to get these drug lords, but unfortunately, the police, they are not cooperating with us because some of them are in collaboration with these criminals,” he charged. “Maybe they fear for their lives because they live in the same areas with them.”

Shongo was referring to an ongoing commission investigating police corruption involving senior government officials and leading to the the suspension of Senzo Mchunu, national minister of police.

“So this operation, … is it going to be a success? I don’t know. It all depends on the police,” he said, adding that he and his fellow soldiers long for the day when the government lets the army solve the problem on its own.

“Even when we’re just sitting at lunch as soldiers, we talk about the police. We pray that one day the state can say, ‘Let’s take the army into the country and clean up all these weapons, all these guns, all these gangsters,'” he said.

“The military is ready, and they want to make a point because we were hungry for these things.”