Image Source: ENCA
Local – Despite the deployment of the South African National Defence Force across the Western Cape, gang-related violence and shootings have continued to devastate communities on the Cape Flats.
According to reports, within the past few weeks, a six-year-old girl was caught in a crossfire between two rival gangs in Hanover Park and is currently fighting for her life.
Three people were shot in Gugulethu, two men were killed while two others were injured — including children— in a mass shooting at the Portland taxi rank in the Cape Town city centre, and two people were shot dead in an informal dwelling on Turfburg Walk in Hanover Park.
The attacks have renewed calls for the government to look beyond policing and address the conditions that fuel gangsterism and crime. Critics argue that military boots on the ground treat the symptom rather than the disease, offering desperate communities’ temporary relief while structural poverty, unemployment, and school dropout rates remain unaddressed.
Yaseen Johaar, a member of the Hanover Park Community Policing Forum who stepped down to focus on deeper crime prevention work, said the government’s response was narrowly focused on the problem’s symptoms rather than its root causes. He said residents had welcomed the army out of sheer desperation, not because they believed it would work.
“You can put as many boots on the ground as we want, the situation won’t change — the bread and butter issues remain the same, crime will remain the same, people are starving, people are hungry, unemployment is rife, and high schooling dropout rates within the struggling communities.”
Root Causes Must Be Tackled, or Gang Violence Will Persist
Johaar argued that as long as socioeconomic conditions remained unresolved, no amount of enforcement would bring lasting peace. He warned that the same conditions devastating Hanover Park would produce identical outcomes in any neighbourhood, including the most affluent.
“If it is that you want to put an army of some sort within the struggling communities, then I would say put an army of social workers, put an army of people who are going to provide food, people are hungry and starving.”
Johaar pushed back on the perception that gang-recruited youth choose that life willingly. He described orphaned, school dropout children being lured into gangs with food and new shoes — their first — and said those in positions of power had failed the community’s most vulnerable.
“Safety in general is a basic human right. And so what we can say is that our basic human rights have been violated by those politicising and by those who were given the responsibility to put the money and the funds in the right place in order to garner the support that is needed.”
