Mistake to exclude Nelson Mandela Bay from gang-fighting intervention

President Cyril Ramaphosa should have included the Nelson Mandela Bay metro in his plans to deploy the army to help police fight gangsterism in Cape Town and parts of Gauteng. We say so not out of political populism and hankering for attention, but because law enforcement agencies in our city — especially in the northern areas — do need help in subduing and defeating armed criminal gangs. Our communities, especially in historically neglected townships, suffer the same kind of terror residents of the Cape Flats, Katlehong and Eldorado Park suffer at the hands of drug cartel and gold-smuggling Zama Zama gangs.

Acting police minister Prof Firoz Cachalia confirmed as much when he visited Nelson Mandela Bay in January. He told policing forums at a meeting in the city that he did not believe that police were “currently in a position to defeat crime”, pointing out that the same pattern of “a killing spree” in the Western Cape was emerging in the Eastern Cape. The minister went on to admit: “I have made some observations, and I have indicated that the challenge of organised crime in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape is one we still have to confront.

“We had a discussion about organised crime in the Eastern Cape, including extortion rackets, gang violence and related … “This is a grave problem … These criminal cartels wield significant wealth and power, and that is deeply worrying … “I am waiting for the strategy that the police are working on to present to me,” Cachalia said in January. Given these concerns expressed by the minister, one would have thought that the president would place the province, or at least parts of Gqeberha, among the hotspots that need the involvement of the army to fight crime. It may very well be that it was an oversight on the part of the president’s speech writers ahead of the state of the nation, that indeed the president does see what is happening in the northern areas as requiring the army’s intervention. Parliament will be debating the president’s speech this week and Ramaphosa is expected to reply to the debate on Wednesday.