In his recent state of the nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the deployment of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to crime hotspots in Gauteng and the Western Cape.
It was later announced that the deployment would include the Eastern Cape.
The army is expected to aid the South African Police Service (SAPS) to deal with violent and gang-related crimes that are tearing some communities in these provinces asunder.
Over the years, the gang-violence in the Cape Flats has caused untold suffering, with thousands of lives lost.
Many of those killed are children, who are often victims of stray bullets that fly at all hours of the day and night in the area.
The violence is so extreme that parents are often forced to keep their children home because travel to school and even local spaza shops is too dangerous.
For this reason, it is understandable that residents in crime-plagued communities welcome the deployment of the army. They want, and deserve, to live in peace and to not have to bury their children every weekend.
But the reality of the situation is that the deployment of the army to fight crime is a short-term solution to a systemic problem — one that requires far more sustainable solutions than the president has put on the table.
Gang violence, a critical area that the army will be intervening in, is the byproduct of systemic neglect and challenges such as high levels of unemployment, a lack of public infrastructure, high levels of poverty and a poor quality of education.
Numerous empirical and non-empirical studies have consistently demonstrated that crime is directly linked to socio-economic and political conditions in the country.
This is true for SA and other countries across the world. The evidence of this can be gleaned in Haiti, where violent gangs which now control the Caribbean nation were able to do so after a socio-economic catastrophe that contributed to the collapse of the government.
In addition, and as argued by many scholars and activists, there is inherent and fundamental conflict between military training and policing roles.
Soldiers are trained to use lethal force, not for the restraint, negotiation and minimum force required in civilian law enforcement.
This was laid bare in 2020 when the army was deployed to aid with the enforcement of lockdown regulations that included the limiting of people’s movement.
The tactics that the army used in certain instances can only be described as torture.
A number of civilians were also killed at the hands of the army. One of them, Collins Khoza, died of blunt-force trauma after he was brutally assaulted by soldiers at his home when they found a cup of alcohol in his yard.
Other civilians were also maimed. Examples include the shooting of a man at a mall in Limpopo for allegedly not wearing a mask. Soldiers are not trained like police are, and so, where they are deployed, the extra-judicial abuse of coercive power and use of violence is inevitable.
But an even more important point is that the SANDF has been deployed numerous times for crime-fighting in the democratic dispensation, and specifically in the Cape Flats.
The most recent deployment was in 2019 when soldiers were sent to gang hotspots in the Cape Flats after a weekend of extreme violence in which more than 70 people were killed.
The deployment was celebrated by residents of the region, but the evidence is clear that it did not result in any meaningful long-term changes.
In fact, crime increased significantly as soon as the soldiers left.
While 1,875 gang-related murders were reported in 2019, a total of 2104 gang-related murders were reported in Cape Flats police stations during the first nine months of 2025 alone.
The lesson is clear — deploying the army to help curb crime is a short-term solution, and a cosmetic one in the absence of meaningful structural changes.
A serious government has a duty to go beyond the immediate, especially when the short-term solutions have proved to worsen a crisis.
