Cape Crime Crisis Coalition’s Reverend Dr Llewellyn MacMaster argues that the decision by President Cyril Ramaphosa to deploy the army to deal with gangs points to fundamental failures in the governments strategies to keep its citizens safe.
The Cape Crime Crisis Coalition (C4) rejects the rationale for the deployment of the SANDF to combat gangs and gang-related crime and violence on the Cape Flats and in Gauteng. The deployment of the army is not a solution; it is a surrender.
President Ramaphosa’s SONA 2026 announcement to bring in the SANDF is an unequivocal admission that the state has lost the strategic initiative to deliver public safety. When a government calls in the army to perform civilian policing, it confesses that its police leadership is broken, its political oversight has failed, and its reserves of competent governance are exhausted.
We have been here before and the evidence shows that is does not work. In 2019, Operation Prosper was launched with great fanfare in Mitchell’s Plain, Nyanga, and across the Cape Flats. Cameras rolled. Politicians posed. Soldiers patrolled.
Six months later, the army returned to barracks.
In a 2020 evaluation of Operation Prosper examining the role and impact of the SANDF, including its impact on the murder rate the findings show: “That there does appear to have been a reduction in murders in the month when the deployment started but found no evidence that the army presence significantly reduced murders in the affected communities over the deployment period, as compared with similar ones where the army was absent.”
What did happen is that gangs returned to terrorising our communities. Over the last year the level of killings has escalated, with mass shootings a regular occurrence – entire groups of people slaughtered in a single event.
The army’s temporary presence did not disrupt the gang economy; it merely paused the count. For communities under sustained siege, calling for the deployment of the army is understandable in the face of a state that has retreated and failed in its constitutional duty to protect its people. But it is not a solution.
Today’s gangs are highly organised criminal syndicates. Dealing with organised crime requires an organised and highly efficient police service with experienced detectives.
This is something the army cannot do. Gangs and organised crime are embedded social institutions. They are not weakened by these deployments. They adapt. They consolidate.
They watch the state cycle through the same performative gestures—soldiers, cordons, press conferences and understand that the underlying machinery remains broken.
Instead, the Cape Crime Crisis Coalition calls on the on the President and the Provincial Government to declare a Provincial State of Disaster in the Western Cape, in terms of the Disaster Management Act, 2002. Doing so will unlock resources, enable intergovernmental coordination, and address some of the root causes of gang violence. It is subject to parliamentary oversight, provincial legislative scrutiny, and judicial review. It does not erode the constitutional order; it activates it.
A State of Disaster compels all spheres of government—national, provincial, local—to work under a single, integrated command and control structure. It permits the redirecting of national funds to provincial and local levels, allowing rapid procurement of resources for housing, health, education, and social development, the very conditions in which gangs flourish.
Gangsterism is not a military problem: It is a social, economic, and developmental crisis expressing itself through violence.
A State of Disaster permits the declaration of a social compact binding government, business, labour, and civil society to a sustained, multi-year programme of intervention. It therefore empowers communities to act rather than occupying them. It mandates the inclusion of Community Police Forums, neighbourhood watches, and civil society organisations in planning and oversight.
We are being presented with a false dichotomy: that the only choice is between soldiers and surrender. This is false. You cannot patrol your way out of organised crime. There is a third path one that does not treat the Cape Flats as a war zone, but as a disaster area
deserving of the same urgency and resources we extend to communities struck by flood, fire, or pandemic. The people of the Cape Flats do not need soldiers.
They need a state that treats their lives as seriously as it treats a flood. The people of this province deserve better than soldiers. They deserve public safety.
Security theatre is not safety. And they people have been waiting decades for the state to deliver it.