Disaster Is Not the Problem. Denial Is: Cape Flats Gang Violence

Once again, working-class communities on the Cape Flats are being asked to wait. To be patient. To understand “process” while burying children.

Premier Alan Winde says calls to declare gang violence a disaster are under review, but insists the power lies with national government. Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia admits SAPS is not equipped and that a strategy still needs to be presented. Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis responds by renewing calls for the devolution of policing powers.

Everyone is Speaking. No-one is Taking Responsibility

Civil society, including the Cape Crime Crisis Coalition (C4), is right to call this what it is: a sustained humanitarian emergency. A disaster unfolding in slow motion, measured not in headlines but in funerals, trauma, and school closures.

The problem is not the call for a disaster declaration. The problem is how politicians use legal technicalities and blame-shifting to avoid decisive action.

Winde’s claim that only national government can declare a disaster is, at best, selective honesty. The Western Cape government has repeatedly declared provincial disasters for water shortages, wildfires, and agricultural crises. When the interests at stake are economic, agricultural, or investor-facing, urgency appears overnight. When the crisis is the daily slaughter of poor, working-class people, suddenly everyone’s hands are tied.

That contradiction demands scrutiny. It raises an uncomfortable question: whose lives trigger urgency, and whose lives are treated as collateral?

Cachalia’s admission is equally revealing. To say “we are not equipped” without an immediate emergency mobilisation is not candour. It is abdication. Communities do not need another strategy document. They need a justice system that works, a police service that investigates, and a state that treats organised crime as a national emergency rather than a talking point.

Hill-Lewis’s response is perhaps the most dangerous. The push for devolution of policing powers is being sold as innovation, but for working-class communities, it carries a familiar threat. We already experience LEAP and Metro Police not as protectors but as enforcers of poverty.

Informal traders are harassed. Taxi operators are targeted. Backyard dwellers, shack dwellers, and unhoused people are criminalised through by-laws. Metro Police arrive in numbers to confiscate stock, fine survivalist traders, and police movement. Yet when gangs shoot up streets or extort businesses, that presence evaporates.

Why The Devolution of Policing Powers Will Not Lead to Justice

This is why the call for devolution must be treated with caution, the City is already calling for a Gaza or Mexican border type of wall the N2. Without deep structural reform, devolved policing risks becoming a localised version of the United States’ ICE model: heavily armed, enforcement-driven, racially and economically selective, and detached from constitutional protections.

More powers in the hands of the same institutions that already criminalise poverty will not produce safety. It will produce more abuse.

The DA is Lying to You: Crime Motion is a Distraction

Violence is not only a policing failure. It is a justice failure. Gang courts remain limited and under-resourced. The Prevention of Organised Crime Act exists on paper, but asset forfeiture is inconsistently pursued and rarely felt at community level. Dockets collapse. Witnesses are left exposed. Prosecutorial capacity is thin. Allegations of political interference in policing and prosecution, now under national scrutiny following the Mkhwanazi revelations, point to a justice system compromised not by lack of law, but by lack of political will.

Equally absent is the Department of Social Development. Where are the emergency trauma teams for children living under constant gunfire? Where are the substance-abuse interventions scaled to match the crisis? Where are the family preservation programmes, youth employment pipelines, and mental health services demanded by the Constitution?

The state cannot claim surprise. Section 7(2) of the Constitution obliges it to respect, protect, promote, and fulfil rights. The right to life, dignity, safety, education, and healthcare are being systematically violated in working-class communities. This is not misfortune. It is constitutional neglect.

If a state of disaster is declared, it must trigger more than uniforms and guns.

A Unified Command Across Agencies

In the short term, it must force a unified command across SAPS, the NPA, the courts, and Social Development. Gang courts must be expanded. Witness protection must be resourced. Detectives must be supported, not rotated into exhaustion. But critically, the economic foundations of organised crime must be dismantled. South Africa already has the legal tools. What it lacks is imagination and courage.

In Italy, assets seized from mafia organisations are not left to decay or absorbed quietly into state coffers. They are repurposed for social use: community centres, cooperatives, housing, youth programmes. Crime is stripped of its profit and communities reclaim stolen wealth.

In New Zealand, proceeds recovered under crime legislation are channelled into civilian agencies and community-based harm prevention, including addiction services and organised crime disruption.

This is the model we should be fighting for. Assets seized from gangs and extortion networks should be held in public trust and redirected to civil society organisations working on violence prevention, trauma support, substance abuse treatment, and youth livelihoods. Let the wealth extracted through bloodshed be used to heal the damage it caused.

A disaster declaration must also suspend the punitive enforcement of by-laws that criminalise survival. Safety cannot be built while the poor are treated as offenders and the powerful remain untouched.

The Truth About Why Gang Violence Persists

The truth is simple. Gang violence persists not because we lack laws, plans, or police. It persists because the system tolerates a hierarchy of lives. Because profit, politics, and appearances are prioritised over justice.

Communities are exhausted by blame-shifting. What we need now is not another passing of the ball, but a line drawn in the sand.

Disaster is already here. The question is whether the state will finally choose people over power.

Henriette Abrahams is a Community Activist based in Bonteheuwel, Cape Town and is also the chairperson of the Bonteheuwel Development Forum.