SANDF goes to the Cape Flats… but when will their work start?

The South African National Defence Force is expected to return to the Western Cape in force following Police Minister Bheki Cele’s bombshell that he and Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula had asked President Cyril Ramaphosa to authorise deploying the SANDF on the Cape Flats – but not right away, and it’s not known when.

While the authorisation for a battalion has been granted, what a minister of police wants, a minister of police does not always immediately get and even with presidential authority, there is a bunch of paperwork to do.

The battalion being deployed has to be identified, where base camp will be set up, will it be open ground (probably a bad idea) or a building, lines of supply, and who’s going to foot the bill for what.

In a statement, General Solly Shoke noted he had been tasked “to deploy various South African National Defence Force (SANDF) elements to render assistance to the South African Police Services (SAPS) in the identified crime-ridden hotspots in the Western Cape”.

The statement noted a battalion would be deployed with support elements during Operation Prosper.

“It must be noted that the SANDF gets requested from time to time to assist the SAPS in crime prevention operations,” the statement read.

All of which makes this not the SANDF’s first rodeo.

Four years ago, under the guise of Operation Fiela, the SANDF together with police, Sars, Home Affairs, and a plethora of other departments raided, searched, and arrested anyone who did not have a reasonable explanation for anything.

In December 2015, as the operation began to wrap up, nearly 41,000 arrests were reported, together with 737 vehicles, 375 firearms, and 10 homemade firearms recovered after 3,205 operations.

Fiela 2 was launched in 2018 and appears to have faded away.

Defence analyst John Stupart wrote for the African Defence Review soldiers were trained to “find, fix and finish” their “enemy”.

“But in the policing scenario they are being used in they will be facing communities and individuals whose ‘enemy’ elements are indistinguishable from ordinary civilians, even were one to take for granted that such terminology and the view of the population that it implies were appropriate to this context,” Stupart said.

“Without powers of arrest or investigation, and without the training in community policing that even the SAPS struggle with, the SANDF’s default response to violence will be to shoot first and ask questions later,” Stupart said.

“Politicians and policymakers should not, therefore, be surprised when the army they’ve placed in the townships begins behaving like an army.”

While Fiela appeared to finish with little bloodshed, even if it didn’t endear itself to the general public, the Cape Flats is a very different scenario with gangsters unafraid of fighting back, as evidenced by the six police anti-gang unit members shot and seriously wounded in June.

The collective name for nearly 30 areas, the “Cape Flats” stretch from Bellville in the north, Blue Downs in the east, Khayalitsha and Mitchelles Plain in the south to Guguletu, and roughly 25 km between east and west with an accompanying gang problem in the poverty-stricken flats – which is where the problem lies, said senior analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Simone Haysom.

“One of the fundamental drivers why the gangs are so powerful in the Cape Flats is because there is a very big drug market,” Haysom said.

“Research is showing the corrupting effect of that drug economy on the police is obvious to see,” said Haysom, noting a high level of interaction between street cops and dealers, where dealers would be treated like ATMs with untraceable cash by the cops.

“At a higher level, there’s a long history of senior police officials being implicated in corrupt relationships with the Cape gangs, remember (former Western Cape Provincial Police Commissioner) Arno Lamoer,” Haysom said.

And while there was probably less the SANDF could be corrupted with given their lack of powers, it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out for potential problems, Haysom cautioned.

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