Cape Town, South Africa – Two ominous letters, HL, are spray-painted on a wall at the entrance to Tafelsig, a township in Mitchells Plain on the outskirts of Cape Town: the insignia of the Hard Livings gang, which has menaced communities for five decades.
It is a February day soon after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address, in which he said he would deploy the army to communities across South Africa to tackle crime, drugs and gangs. In Tafelsig, which will likely be included in the operation, many residents respond with weary resignation rather than relief.
Mitchells Plain sits on the Cape Flats — densely populated, impoverished townships about 30km southeast of the city centre. While Cape Town has affluent areas and tourists, the Cape Flats has some of the country’s highest rates of gang-related killings.
“When it was at its worst, [there was a shooting] almost every day,” said Michael Jacobs, chairperson of a local community police forum, driving through streets of run-down houses and corrugated shacks. Around him, people visited spazas (home-grown tuck shops) or sat on corners while toddlers played. Jacobs recounts the daily horrors: recent shootings across the region, a four-person killing in a drug den in Athlone that included a nine-month-old, and the fatal shooting of a prominent cleric outside the Salaamudien Mosque on the first day of Ramadan.
Jacobs and others follow violence on WhatsApp groups. He shared a video with Al Jazeera of two schoolgirls and a taxi driver shot outside a school in Atlantis; one girl later died.
Residents now await the likely arrival of uniformed soldiers and armed vehicles, but many doubt it will improve safety. Critics call the move window dressing, expressing concern about sending soldiers into communities that still bear scars from apartheid-era military crackdowns and citing recent allegations of police corruption at senior levels.
In his February 12 speech, Ramaphosa said he would deploy troops to the Western Cape and Gauteng to tackle gang violence and illegal mining; Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia later added the Eastern Cape and announced a deployment within 10 days, though no soldiers had been sent at the time of reporting. The decision follows pressure from civil society and the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), which governs the Western Cape. The DA joined residents in Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth) for a “Do Our Lives Not Matter?” protest calling for urgent action.
Gauteng’s abandoned mine areas have become battlegrounds involving illegal artisanal miners, known as zama zamas. Gauteng and the Western Cape often top organised crime lists, and the Eastern Cape has seen killings linked to extortion syndicates. Police crime highlights from a recent period cited 15,846 arrests nationwide and the seizure of 173 firearms and 2,628 rounds of ammunition from Feb. 16 to the following Sunday. Gauteng reported high-profile arrests and seizures, including counterfeit goods valued at 98 million rand. Official statistics put South Africa’s average at about 64 people killed every day.
The provinces chosen for deployment have fraught histories with the armed forces. Jacobs recalled his arrest during a 1987 student protest on the Cape Flats opposing the apartheid regime. Three decades into democracy, poverty, unemployment and violent crime persist. Jacobs and others argue the military will not address the root causes that gangs exploit: children are recruited as young as eight, and economic decline has helped the drug trade flourish. The Town Centre shopping mall, once a commercial hub, has become a ghost town where drugs are sold, even adjacent to a police station. Many residents scavenge recyclables to earn small incomes.
Analysts say social interventions must be central to any anti-crime strategy. “There’s 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,” said Ryan Cummings, director of analysis at Signal Risk. Irvin Kinnes, an associate professor at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Criminology, noted constitutional limits on the army’s role among civilians: soldiers are to support police, who remain in command. He warned the government has not learned from past domestic deployments — the army was sent to the Western Cape in 2019 during a spike in violence and again to support COVID-19 enforcement in 2020.
“It’s a very dangerous thing to bring the army because there’s an impatience with the fact that the police are not doing their job,” Kinnes said. Recalling earlier deployments, he warned of heavy-handedness and civilian harm. Critics also see political motives, arguing the move serves as high-profile action ahead of local elections. Kinnes pointed out that police statistics indicated crime had been decreasing without army involvement.
Ramaphosa has defended the plan, saying the military’s role would be supportive, with clear rules of engagement and time-limited objectives, freeing police to focus on core duties while bolstering antigang and illegal-mining units. He highlighted past community-benefiting operations, such as disaster relief and border enforcement, and stressed sensitivity to the country’s history of military repression.
On the ground, soldiers themselves express reluctance. Ntsiki Shongo, a soldier who served in 2019 and during the COVID-19 operation and spoke under a pseudonym, said joint operations are often hampered by poor cooperation from police. “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 cooperation with these criminals,” he charged, referring to a commission investigating police corruption that has implicated senior officials and led to the suspension of national Police Minister Senzo Mchunu.
Shongo said success will depend on police performance. But he and some comrades long for the authority to act alone. “The military is ready, and they want to prove a point because we’ve been hungry for these things,” he said.
For many township residents, the question remains whether soldiers will change entrenched problems of poverty, unemployment, corruption and social decay — or whether the deployment, even if temporary, will exacerbate tensions without delivering lasting safety.