GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
27 September 2026
Sixteen people were shot dead in Cape Town, in under ten hours, last night.
Twelve are lying in hospital.
We extend our deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones in this weekend’s horrific events. We also acknowledge the injustice of all the loss, and injury, families and communities have been left to endure.
Living in daily fear is not normal and we cannot accept it. We have to find real and lasting solutions. Every community has the right to a safe and peaceful home and neighbourhood. Our current approach – armies, soldiers, police – is not working.
Two men were gunned down in a street in Joe Slovo Park on Saturday afternoon. Four men were shot in and around a car in Site C, Khayelitsha. Ten people were massacred at a shisanyama in Lwandle, where they had gone to eat and be together.
No one has been arrested.
A woman, living on the Cape Flats, told me recently: “Ons sal altyd swaarkry”, which means “we will always suffer.” She was not complaining.
She was telling me what those who govern her have taught her to expect. That their lives are meaningless to those with the power and the responsibility to change the conditions that millions of Capetonians endure every day.
Safety is not only about police and soldiers. It will only be resolved if we resolve the conditions people live in, and if we start to provide:
– a decent home
– a real chance of work
– a lit street
– a maintained sports field, and a park, where children can play safely
– a community centre with its doors open and with skills and recreational programmes
Governments build those conditions, or they let them collapse. In Cape Town, they have let them collapse.
As I travel through this city, I see brokenness everywhere. There are broken homes and dark streets. In Kuyasa, children’s play equipment is rusting in stagnant sewer water. At the Bonteheuwel Sports Grounds, the football fields have been left to the community to take care of and a clubhouse, gutted by fire, has been left unrepaired.
In Delft, children play in a park where a boy was killed by equipment that was never maintained. These are not isolated failures; they are what systemic abandonment looks like.
Every sphere of government has given up on the harder work and fallen back on the easily populist response: more boots on the ground.
- In 2019, the Province promised to halve the murder rate in ten years, and poured more than a billion rand into law enforcement officers at the expense of their community development responsibilities;
- The DA-run City’s safety budget is a record R6.8 billion this year.
- National government has sent in the army, which is part of the
R823 million national deployment cost.
Seven years later, more people are being murdered in this province than when the 2019 promise was made. Deployments come and go. The conditions that breed violence stay exactly where they are.
We don’t have a shortage of funding. We’re directing valuable funding at the symptoms of years of neglect instead of fixing what is broken. The Province’s own Safety Plan admits that violence grows out of poverty, unemployment, overcrowding and neglect. Every government, currently tinkering, in this city knows it. None has acted on it at the scale this crisis demands.
That is the failure the City, the Province and national government must answer for. They have not failed to deploy. They have failed to build. Until they change course, families will keep burying their dead, and a woman in this city will keep believing she will always suffer
Media Enquiries: media@forgood.org.za