Cape Town's proposed 3m high, 8km security wall along the N2 highway aims to curb crime but sparks debate over inequality.
Image: Ayanda Ndamane / Independent Newspapers
Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Appropriations, Dr Mmusi Maimane, says the City’s N2 wall project is a failure to deal with effective policy, and entrenches apartheid spatial planning.
Maimane made the remarks while answering questions on Monday at a briefing held by chairpersons of Parliament’s Finance Cluster Committee. He was addressing the deployment of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), which he called a very popular thing to say, it is not a fundamental solution to the crime crisis in the country.
Cape Town's proposed 3m high, 8km security wall along the N2 highway aims to curb crime but sparks debate over inequality.
Image: Ayanda Ndamane/ Independent Newspapers
The City has said its N2 Edge project would seek to replace and reinforce a severely deteriorated security barrier along the N2, alongside a package of safety and community-focused interventions.
“This project will not only repair safety barriers, but also bring various safety improvements for communities along the N2.
“It is not fair that a small number of criminal elements are impacting the safety of hundreds of thousands of daily users of the N2, including commuters from Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, Blue Downs, Eerste River, Mfuleni, the Helderberg, and neighbouring towns,” Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said when the project was announced.
“The N2 Edge project will improve safety alongside the city’s beefed-up highway patrolling, with over 40 new metro cops deployed to the N2, backed by CCTV cameras, automatic number plate recognition, and digital coordination for rapid response to help motorists.”
The City has faced criticism of the project, not only from Khayelitsha residents and political parties, but also this past weekend at Cape Town’s Pride Festival.
Maimane said that he believes the practice of building walls and isolating citizens fails to address effective policy.
“I disagree vehemently with the idea of the wall. I think it entrenches apartheid spatial networking. I really do. I certainly think that it is a poor way of answering the question - who can go inside the community, and who can go outside the community?
“In my humble opinion, if you want to fight crime in communities, rather than deploying the army, we should devolve certain policing functions so that what metro police do, they are not spending their days checking license discs,” Maimane said.
“I think the wall is a symbol of the past. It should not be something we should advance in South Africa today. What we ought to be doing is thinking about a different crime strategy,” Maimane said.
The weekend's Pride Festival saw a protest against the N2 Wall project carried out by “Queers Demand Homes Not Walls”.
“The idea of a wall is very dehumanising, and... that money could be used to fix things in the community, such as unmaintained toilets and insufficient/unmaintained floodlights," Tamara Nechama Thusi said.
“Same thing about taps, and then, of course, housing. This concept of the money being used to build an apartheid wall when it could be used for community upliftment and tackling community problems made us very upset and angry, and we felt that we needed to do something about it,” Thusi said.
Cape Times