THE recent spate of gang shootings all over the Cape Flats is an attack on the very democracy that some of us fought so hard for prior to 1994.
On September 1 your front page headline was “31 killed in 31 days in Delft”. On September 13 your headline was “Teens flee home to escape gangs”.
On January 11 the SABC reported that drug-related crime in the Western Cape was dealt a severe blow when over 1 500 suspects were arrested and drugs worth millions of rand confiscated by the SA Police Service.
Then on January 19, the SABC further reported that the Hawks had carried out one of the biggest Mandrax drug busts in the country when they seized tablets with a street value of more than R12 million.
It is clear that our national government is doing everything in its power to fulfil its constitutional mandate.
Then, four months ago following another flare-up of gang violence in Ottery, renowned police boss Major- General Jeremy Vearey stated that “we have had success in taking down gang leadership and bringing peace, but a number of factors result in flare-ups. We see factors like poverty and joblessness which never change.
"We will police it like we always police it, but 10 years from now we will be saying the same things unless the root causes of these problems are addressed." (Cape Times, May 6).
When the Social Justice Coalition led evidence at the Khayelitsha Commission on Policing, they referred to the relationship between Khayelitsha’s degrading socio-economic conditions and its high levels of violent crime, and by extension the failure of the City of Cape Town and the provincial government to address these failures with sensitivity and on an inclusive basis.
Professor Catherine Ward of UCT also testified that “gangs in South Africa have been created in a particular crucible of economic disenfranchisement and there is little hope that prevention will tamper with their existence”.
She further testified that “gangs are primarily a phenomenon of economically deprived areas where gangs offer young men, in particular, a space of belonging and protection”.
The Khayelitsha Commission also recommended the provincial government urgently establishes a multi-sectoral task team to address youth gangs.
This is an indictment on the DA administration as this very point was included by them in their own anti-gang strategy document adopted by the provincial cabinet in July 2008.
There has also been a spate of promotions of senior police officers at national level, who have been in the service for more than 22 years.
This means that some of those who served in the illegitimate Bantustans under the previous apartheid regime are now in a position to influence the movement of our former Umkhonto we Sizwe police generals, particularly here in the Western Cape – the "redeployment" of Jeremy Vearey and Peter Jacobs being a case in point.
Could this little known fact perhaps be the missing link that explains the brutal mayhem on the Cape Flats as both Vearey and Jacobs were responsible for locking away the leadership of entire gangs prior to their recent demotions?
Colin Arendse
Wynberg