Luthando Stuurman wanted to be a soldier. Last month, four days before his twentieth birthday and just two days after he collected an application to join the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), the 19-year-old was shot dead in Westbury in Johannesburg. Three other young men, all aged between 18 and 20, were also killed.
They died while the soldiers whose ranks Stuurman aspired to join were patrolling the streets of Westbury and other hotspots across five provinces in support of police operations against gangs and illegal mining.
Announcing the SANDF deployment during his State of the Nation Address in February, President Cyril Ramaphosa said that “[o]rganised crime is now the most immediate threat to our democracy, our society and our economic development”. The Presidency put the cost of the deployment at R823 153 960.
No miracles
But despite the military deployment, the killing has continued.
At least 22 people were shot to death in Westbury in July and August, according to community activists. Two Anti-Gang Unit policemen were ambushed and killed by gangsters in Reiger Park on 7 August. In the Western Cape, more than 110 murders (including many gang-related killings) were reported over a period of eight days in late July. Murder in Gqeberha – South Africa’s most violent city – has risen steeply over the past decade. Recorded murders across Nelson Mandela Bay rose from 651 in 2017/18 to 1 452 in 2024/25, an increase of 123%.
The Western Cape remains the epicentre of gang violence in South Africa, with approximately 90% of the country’s gang-related murders occurring in the province since the SAPS quarterly crime statistics were made available.
Since 2020, the number of gang-related murders has more than doubled, increasing from 422 in 2020 to 1 040 in 2025. This is despite the total number of murders in the Western Cape decreasing between the 2023/24 and 2024/25 reporting periods (from 4 544 to 4 369).
Unlike his predecessors, Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia has avoided grand promises and sweeping statements.
He conceded in January:
“I do not believe we are currently in a position to defeat this crime.”
Firoz Cachalia, Acting Minister of Police, January 2026
Much now rests on his “police reset agenda”.
Its priorities include rebuilding a Crime Intelligence division weakened by years of political meddling and corruption; strengthening and expanding detective capacity; assessing the 50 highest-crime precincts; and focusing intensive support on 140 high-crime police stations.
“We won’t promise miracles or short-term fixes,” Cachalia told Parliament in May.
The decision to use the military as a stopgap while longer-term interventions are planned drew both criticism and cautious optimism. In February, the GI-TOC warned that armies may stabilise streets quickly but rarely disrupt the networks, corruption, money flows and supply chains behind organised crime.
Releasing the crime statistics for the first quarter of the 2026/27 financial year, Cachalia was candid. “Sustained deployments hold ground; they do not by themselves transform a precinct. Where we withdraw without building permanent local capacity, the problem returns. That is the honest lesson over the years, and it is shaping how we plan the next phase.”
In Cape Town
But how effective has the deployment really been? The latest quarterly crime statistics offer one gauge. Two comparisons are possible.
The first sets April to June 2026 against the same months of 2025, which is how the police present the figures and which accounts for seasonal swings in crime and violence. The second sets it against January to March 2026, the last quarter before the soldiers arrived. That is closer to a before-and-after test, but it is admittedly a weaker one: murder in South Africa peaks over the festive season and falls to its lowest levels in the first half of the calendar year.
Take Cape Town. Six precincts where the SANDF have been deployed – Delft, Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, Nyanga and Philippi East – are also priority areas under the Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP), run by the Western Cape government and the City of Cape Town since 2020. Those six recorded 273 murders between April and June, down from 329 in the same period a year earlier. The other deployment precincts fell by 23, from 220 to 197. Across all 13, murders fell from 549 to 470.
Put differently, most of the reduction inside the SANDF’s footprint came from precincts that already had a civilian, intelligence-led hotspot programme.
Measured against the quarter immediately preceding the deployment, Cape Town’s murders did not fall at all. Across the 13 deployment precincts, they rose from 430 in January to March to 470 in April to June, an increase of 9.3%, and across the Western Cape from 983 to 1 071.
In each of the previous four years, murders in the same 13 precincts rose between those two quarters, by between 7.7% and 20.7%, so this year’s rise sits inside the normal seasonal range; it is the second-smallest of the five.
The split between the LEAP and non-LEAP precincts holds here too. The six LEAP precincts rose from 262 to 273, or 4.2%, the smallest such increase in five years of station data. The other seven rose from 168 to 197, or 17.3%, a larger increase than in either of the two preceding years.
Gang violence in Cape Town is largely gun violence: firearms were used in 663 of 991 Western Cape murder dockets analysed by police.
Across the deployment precincts, illegal firearm and ammunition charges rose only from 324 to 339 year-on-year, while province-wide they fell by 3.5%. Against the previous quarter, the picture is flatter still: 347 to 339 in the deployment precincts and 774 to 792 across the province.
Operation Prosper’s own recoveries were smaller still: 25 illegal firearms seized across five provinces in June, compared with 792 illegal firearm possession charges generated by ordinary policing in the Western Cape alone over the three months of the quarter.
Gauteng and Eastern Cape are messy
Across precincts where soldiers were sent in Gauteng – Sophiatown for Westbury, Eldorado Park, Reiger Park and Langlaagte for Riverlea – murders fell from 74 to 56. Against the previous quarter, they fell from 63 to 56. Most of that decline came from Eldorado Park, where murders fell from 26 to 12, with a further fall of seven in Langlaagte.
In Sophiatown, the figure barely moved, from 23 to 21 year-on-year, and rose from 15 to 21 against the previous quarter, while attempted murder rose and illegal firearm possession charges halved. In Reiger Park, where the Anti-Gang Unit constables were killed, murder rose from 13 to 18, up from 10 in the preceding quarter.
Westbury’s longer record is more telling: 79 people were murdered in the Sophiatown precinct, which polices Westbury, in the year to March 2026, and another 21 in the quarter that followed.
The pattern in deployment areas in the Eastern Cape is similar. In the seven precincts where 290 soldiers were deployed, murder fell from 101 to 93, but attempted murder rose from 74 to 101, and firearm charges fell from 62 to 51. The comparison with January to March runs the same way: murder down from 99, attempted murder up from 81, firearm charges down from 65.
The deployment has generated hundreds of arrests, many of them for drug possession. In Cape Town, recorded drug-related arrests have risen by 23.7%. Much of that rise was already occurring before the soldiers arrived: detections in the same precincts climbed from 5 911 in April to June 2025 to 6 979 in January to March 2026, and the increase in the deployment quarter itself, to 7 313, was 4.8%.
But such detections depend heavily on officer numbers; during a surge, they may record the surge more than a weakened criminal market. Defence Minister Angie Motshekga made the same point in August, telling the National Council of Provinces that “catching the runners will not solve organised crime” and that “we’re not going to be there forever”.
Success on the ground?
As for dismantling gangs, Cachalia settled the matter in a written reply to Parliament in July: “No gangs were dismantled during this period.” He added that “dismantled” means the entire gang ceases to exist.
Operation Prosper’s arrest profile says a great deal about what it is – and what it is not. Of the 1 149 arrests reported for June, 269 were for immigration offences, 212 for drugs and 183 for illegal dealing in liquor. Only 22 were for firearms and ammunition, and five each for murder and attempted murder. Immigration, drug and liquor offences outnumbered firearm and homicide arrests by 20 to one.
MPs saw the same pattern on the ground.
During an oversight visit to six Cape Flats areas on 14 August, members raised concern that the operation had resulted mainly in arrests of drug runners, while the major figures behind the drug trade and gang activity remained at large. ActionSA MP Dereleen James said soldiers themselves told the delegation the focus had been placed on “tuck shops and shebeens”, rather than drugs, gangsters and organised criminal networks.
Whether the arrests will translate into prosecutions and convictions remains unclear.
Residents are blunter. A neighbourhood watch member in Grassy Park told us gangsters are often tipped off before raids because “there are more people involved”.
“The other thing is that they [the SANDF] can shoot, but they can’t search,” he said. “So then, what is the point?”
A reformed Nice Time Kid turned community pastor in Mitchells Plain said: “The army are up to kak (shit) here on the Cape Flats… I don’t know how much Ramaphosa paid for them, but that moegoe (idiot) wasted millions. In Mitchells Plain, in Bonteheuwel, in Heideveld, in Hanover Park, in Lavender Hill, in all these areas, the gangs were still shooting and killing each other. The stray bullets will still shoot and kill children that are playing in the streets. The army did nothing to stop the gangs from selling tik and neus kos (cocaine) on the streets.”
None of this should surprise anyone. When soldiers were sent to the Cape Flats in 2019 under Operation Lockdown, a South African Crime Quarterly study found no evidence that their presence reduced murders. GI-TOC’s Western Cape Gang Monitor reported in March that law enforcement officers had warned that violence was more likely to be displaced to nearby areas than eliminated.
Guy Lamb of Stellenbosch University has written that deployments can reduce violent crime in targeted areas, but only where large numbers of wanted criminals are arrested, and that the effect fades within a year of withdrawal.
The evidence of success so far is thin: murders are down in some areas year-on-year (in Cape Town they rose against the quarter before the soldiers arrived), but firearms remain abundant, shootings continue, arrests are concentrated at the lower end of the criminal economy, and not a single gang has been dismantled.
Ultimately, success will turn not on the deployment or more boots on the ground, but on police reform, rooting out corruption, and building capacity to investigate and prosecute cases targeting gang leaders.
It will also require sustained work across health, education and social development to address the conditions that drive gang violence.
This article was first published by News24 on 3 September 2026.