Running a business is difficult enough without the stresses of soaring input costs like electricity and rates and crime
Running a business is difficult enough without the stresses of soaring input costs like electricity and rates. But in the Cape Flats suburb of Hanover Park residents also have to deal with daily shootings – two-a-day in July – due to a breakdown in law and order linked to rampant gangsterism.
Sadly Hanover Park is not the only suburban war zone according to the latest crime statistics; the nearby Cape Town suburbs of Lavender Hill, Manenberg and Nyanga all feature on the worst crime rate list of police precincts, collectively pushing up the provincial violent crime rate at a time when everybody is talking up the Western Cape’s economic prospects. The Province saw a 21% increase in murder between April and June.
It is difficult to quantify the impact of such rampant criminality on the regional economy. We will never know what Hanover Park might have become without daily gun battles keeping its fearful residents indoors. Nor will we know what garage entrepreneur might already have emerged in Manenberg if he or she had not been co-opted into the neighbourhood gang.
What we do know is that crime is one of the biggest obstacles to business growth, and that assurances of future growth will remain meaningless sugarcoating unless government can restore law and order where people live and work.
We also know that, while criminals do not appear to be in short supply, South Africa also has a history of community activism underpinning our society. There are many fighting behind the scenes to bring peace to places like Hanover Park where, in all honesty, democracy is just a nine-letter word and not a lived experience. Against all odds residents and police officers regularly risk their lives to bring criminals to book. People like Elsies River neighbourhood watch patroller Clinton True who was killed in a botched hijacking in early September.
Every killing sets us back in the quest to heal a fractured community; every unsolved crime is an insult to those who sacrificed their personal wellbeing in the belief that we can move beyond the cycle of violence.
Fortunately the provincial government is set to trial a new deployment strategy involving its Law Enforcement Action Plan (LEAP) officers, with a ‘double-up’ deployment in six Cape Town crime hotspots. A Reaction Unit of 120 additional officers will be deployed tot Hanover Park and Manenberg and several other areas which do not have permanently stationed LEAP officers.
We commend the Province for responding with the necessary urgency.
In times of trouble, collectively and individually, we find out who we are. Let each of us do what we can to restore hope to our communities, or to support those doing so on our behalf.
John Lawson
CEO of the Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry