CAPE OF FEAR: ANALYSIS: Sending in soldiers solves very little – as Cape Town’s track record shows

The South African National Defence Force was deployed in Manenberg, Cape Town, 21 years ago. Around 15kms from the pretty City Bowl and the luxurious Atlantic seaboard, a deadly conflict was under way across the Cape Flats between gangsters and Pagad, the anti-drug vigilantes, and between gangsters and other gangsters, that I reported on as a young reporter, then forOn one of the first nights the SANDF were deployed to Manenberg I watched what unfolded into the early hours of the morning.

I returned to Manenberg, usually, but not only, because another gang fight killed a youngster, or gangster, or bystanders. Efforts by community activists to put up after-school programmes, to show the youth different possibilities or to put up community anti-crime structures somehow never got official support, while on occasion sparking active opposition by officialdom.

When 18 people were killed over 17 days in September 2017 in Philippi East, saturation policing – sans soldiers then – unfolded with additional police deployed until April 2018 on ministerial orders. But that show of security forces’didn’t fundamentally resolve anything, as highlighted just 22 months later by the killings of 13 people over two days.

The reality is that the SAPS is too afraid of what it needs to do – to get out of their offices and vehicles to patrol on foot in among the narrow spaces between shacks,In other words, police, trained, with bullet-proof vests, helmets, pepper spray, batons and guns are unwilling to patrol between the shacks where women must walk at night because the only ablution facilities are communal pit latrines. As must anyone who gets up before dawn to catch public transport in the dark to get to work.

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