Our Viewpoint | The army and crime

The sight of soldiers patrolling the streets of Johannesburg this week shows just how serious South Africa’s crime crisis has become. When a democratic state must deploy the army to support the police in dealing with gangsterism, organised crime and streets turned into killing zones, its deeply ominous. About 550 members of the South African National Defence Force have been deployed in Gauteng as part of a wider national effort to tackle violent gangs and heavily armed criminal syndicates.

The army has also been deployed to Durban and several parts of the Western Cape. These are the ganglands in South Africa. Communities terrorised by shootings, drugs and extortion understandably welcome any intervention that restores a measure of safety.

The country cannot allow gang leaders and criminal warlords to control neighbourhoods while ordinary residents live in fear. The state must reassert authority over illegal firearms, narcotics networks and organised crime syndicates that operate with growing confidence. Yet the presence of soldiers on city streets should also trouble us.

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The army is not trained for routine law enforcement. Its role is national defence, not day-to-day policing. Military deployments may stabilise volatile situations temporarily, but they cannot become the default response to crime.

When soldiers replace police officers, it suggests that the institutions responsible for maintaining law and order are failing. The deeper crisis lies within the criminal justice system itself. The Madlanga Commission of Inquiry is investigating allegations that corruption, political interference and organised syndicates have infiltrated elements of the police, prosecutors and intelligence structures.

If those tasked with enforcing the law are compromised, the battle against crime becomes far harder to win. Corruption is the root from which many other problems grow. It allows criminals to evade arrest, obtain weapons, manipulate investigations and undermine prosecutions.

Deploying soldiers may buy time. It may disrupt gangs and illegal mining syndicates in the shortterm. But it cannot substitute for rebuilding honest, capable policing and a justice system the public can trust.

South Africa must confront the guns, the drugs and the warlords. But the lasting solution lies in rooting out corruption and restoring integrity to law enforcement — not in turning our streets into military patrol zones.

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