{"id":13697,"date":"2026-03-03T07:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T07:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/?p=13697"},"modified":"2026-03-03T07:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T07:16:08","slug":"a-dangerous-thing-s-africas-gang-ridden-townships-fear-army-deployment-military-news-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/?p=13697","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A dangerous thing\u2019: S Africa\u2019s gang-ridden townships fear army deployment | Military News"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Cape Town, South Africa \u2013<\/strong> Two ominous letters are spray-painted on a wall at the entrance to Tafelsig, a township in Mitchells Plain on the outskirts of Cape Town: HL \u2013 the insignia of the Hard Livings gang, which has threatened communities there for five decades.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a February day soon after the president\u2019s state of the nation address, in which Cyril Ramaphosa boldly announced he\u2019d be deploying the army to communities across South Africa to tackle the growing crisis of crime, drugs and gangs. But in Tafelsig, which will likely be part of the new military operation, most people seem unbothered by the news.<\/p>\n

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Mitchells Plain is on the Cape Flats \u2013 a series of densely populated, impoverished townships about 30km (19 miles) southeast of the wealthy city centre 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 accounts for the highest rate of gang-related killings in the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it was at its worst, [there was a shooting] almost every day,\u201d said Michael Jacobs, the chairperson of a local community police forum.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether it\u2019s day or whether it\u2019s night, they\u2019re shooting somewhere on the Cape Flats,\u201d he added on a drive through the settlement of run-down houses and corrugated iron shacks.<\/p>\n

Around him, residents made their way to a home-grown tuck shop, known as a spaza, or sat on street corners while toddlers ran about.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow is this conducive to raising children?\u201d he asked, recounting the horrors of life in Mitchells Plain.<\/p>\n

In the past week, four people, including a nine-month-old, had been shot and killed in a drug den in Athlone, about 17km (10 miles) away.<\/p>\n

A beloved Muslim cleric who is rumoured to have angered a gang leader over a personal dispute was also shot dead on the first day of Ramadan as he was leaving the Salaamudien Mosque on a nearby street.<\/p>\n

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

\"cape
The Salaamudien Mosque, where a cleric was gunned down on the first day of Ramadan [Otha Fadana\/Al Jazeera]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tafelsig residents now await the probable arrival of uniformed soldiers and armed vehicles in their neighbourhood, but have little hope that it will make a difference.<\/p>\n

Despite his weariness with the violence, Jacobs is far from enthusiastic about a decision to deploy the army.<\/p>\n

Other critics of the government\u2019s decision said it is window dressing more than a real solution while some question the wisdom of such a drastic step in a country where the military has a history of brutality and where recent explosive allegations about police corruption at the highest levels have surfaced.<\/p>\n

\u2018Do our lives not matter?\u2019<\/h2>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u2013 although no soldiers have so far been deployed.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s decision followed pressure from civil society groups and the Democratic Alliance (DA) party, which runs the Western Cape, to take drastic action to curb widespread gang-related violence in the three provinces.<\/p>\n

A day before its province was added to the deployment schedule, the DA joined residents in Gqeberha, the largest city in the Eastern Cape, for a \u201cDo Our Lives Not Matter?\u201d protest to demand that Ramaphosa take urgent action.<\/p>\n

In Gauteng, neighbourhoods surrounding the province\u2019s once-lucrative abandoned mines have often been turned into battlegrounds, resulting in shootouts between police and illegal artisanal miners, known as zama zamas.<\/p>\n

Gauteng and the Western Cape frequently appear at the top of the country\u2019s organised crime lists while the Eastern Cape made headlines last year for a series of killings linked to extortion syndicates.<\/p>\n

In the latest crime statistics, 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.<\/p>\n

Gauteng took up the most space in the police\u2019s crime highlights, which included a 16-year-old arrested in Roodepoort for possession and distribution of explosives and the seizure of counterfeit clothing and shoes worth 98 million rand ($6.1m).<\/p>\n

Overall, South Africa has some of the world\u2019s most violent crime with an average of 64 people killed every day<\/a>, according to official statistics.<\/p>\n

The three provinces selected for military deployments have a turbulent history with the armed forces, not least during the apartheid era when the regime used soldiers to unleash deadly crackdowns on antiapartheid activists.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were the enemy,\u201d Jacobs said, recalling his own arrest in September 1987 during a student protest on the Cape Flats opposing the racist government, which was replaced in the country\u2019s first democratic elections in 1994.<\/p>\n

\"Cape
Michael Jacobs at his office in Cape Town [Otha Fadana\/Al Jazeera]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today after three decades of democracy, poverty, unemployment and violent crime remain a major challenge in the area.<\/p>\n

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

The Town Centre, a shopping mall that was once a hub of economic activity, has been reduced to a ghost town where the drug trade thrives despite the fact that it is right next to a police station, according to Jacobs.<\/p>\n

For him, there is a direct link between the country\u2019s economic decline and the flourishing of gang activity over the past decade on the Cape Flats, where working-class people have seen their livelihoods stripped away as the manufacturing sector shrank.<\/p>\n

On an average weekday when children should be at school, he said, you see children and even women in their 60s in Mitchells Plain digging through rubbish bins to find glass, plastic or other things they can recycle and turn into income. \u201cAt least it will put something on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plugging a \u2018haemorrhage\u2019<\/h2>\n

Social issues and not simply military intervention should be put at the heart of government anticrime efforts, analysts say.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no other way to describe it other than plugging a hole that is haemorrhaging at the moment with regards to these forms of organised crime,\u201d said Ryan Cummings, director of analysis at Signal Risk, an Africa-focused risk management firm.<\/p>\n

Irvin Kinnes, an associate professor with the University of Cape Town\u2019s Centre for Criminology, pointed out that constitutionally the army is limited in the duties its members may perform among the civilian population. Their role will be largely to support police, who will retain control of all operations.<\/p>\n

He fears the government has not learned lessons from previous army deployments in South Africa\u2019s democratic era.<\/p>\n

The army was dispatched to the Western Cape in 2019 during a previous spike in gang violence and was again sent in to help with the enforcement of COVID-19 restrictions the following year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very dangerous thing to bring the army because there\u2019s an impatience with the fact that the police are not doing their job. And so they come in with that mentality and want to beat up everybody and break people\u2019s bones,\u201d Kinnes said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe saw what happened in COVID. They killed people as the army. It\u2019s not as if the police don\u2019t kill people, but the point is, you don\u2019t need the army to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the government\u2019s detractors, summoning the army is nothing more than an attempt at political heroics before local elections due to be held this year or in early 2027.<\/p>\n

Kinnes pointed out that, according to police statistics, crime has been decreasing without the help of the army.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very much political. It\u2019s to show that the political leaders have kind of heard the public. But the call for the army hasn\u2019t come from the community. It\u2019s come from politicians,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"Residents
Police stand guard while South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visits crime-ridden Hanover Park in Cape Town in 2018 [File: Mike Hutchings\/Reuters]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2018The military is ready\u2019<\/h2>\n

Ramaphosa, who has yet to reveal details of the military deployment, has defended his decision. On Monday in his weekly newsletter, the president sought to separate the South African armed forces from their troubling past, listing several operations that benefitted communities, such as disaster relief efforts and law enforcement operations at the border.<\/p>\n

He made it clear that the army\u2019s role would merely be a supporting one \u201cwith clear rules of engagement and for specific time-limited objectives\u201d.<\/p>\n

Its presence may free up officers to focus on police work and would take place alongside other measures, such as strengthening antigang units and illegal mining teams, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven 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] inside the country to deal with domestic threats without good reason,\u201d Ramaphosa wrote.<\/p>\n

Cummings said it was clear the president\u2019s hand was forced amid an unrelenting wave of violence. \u201cThe rhetoric of the president up until now suggests that this was a directive that he was not necessarily too keen on implementing.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the ground, soldiers appear equally reluctant about their pending engagement.<\/p>\n

Ntsiki Shongo is a soldier who was 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe [in the army] become so negative when we are working with them [the police] because always we don\u2019t get what we need,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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 cooperation with these criminals,\u201d he charged. \u201cMaybe they are scared for their lives because they are staying in the same areas with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shongo referred to an ongoing commission investigating police corruption that has implicated senior government officials and led to the suspension of national Police Minister Senzo Mchunu.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo this operation, \u2026 is it going to be a success? I don\u2019t know. It all depends on the police,\u201d he said, adding that he and his fellow soldiers long for the day the government lets the military solve the problem on its own.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven when we are just sitting having lunch as soldiers, we talk about the police. We pray that one day the state can say, \u2018Let\u2019s take the military inside the country and clean out all these weapons, all these guns, all these gangsters,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe military is ready, and they want to prove a point because we\u2019ve been hungry for these things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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