GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
30 July 2026
Lieutenant General Sizakhele Dyantyi, the man named as the new Western Cape Police Commissioner, has inherited the impossible task of curbing gangsterism in communities on which municipal and provincial authorities have effectively turned their backs.
Colour-coded Cape Flats “neighbourhoods” were established as part of the apartheid spatial masterplan in the 1960s, and populated by forced removals. They were grim, depressing and under-developed places, far from workplaces… communities of traumatised and oppressed people in which a culture of gangsterism thrived.
Since the 1960s they have become radically over-crowded, though never up-graded – and they have been joined by sprawling and under-serviced informal settlements populated as a consequence of urbanisation.
Since the 1990s, neither the physical nor psychological marginalisation of the Cape Flats has been addressed in any meaningful shape or form. The culture of gangsterism and violence has not been eradicated because the daily lived experience of the people has not changed, and the generational trauma has not been acknowledged.
There are guardrails to stop children in the suburbs who experiment with alcohol or drugs from falling off the edge, school psychologists, social workers and peer pressure, among them. There are few such guardrails on the Cape Flats where children fall into the hands of gangs.
These are not policing issues; they are issues of social justice.
Lieutenant General Dyantyi is a highly qualified and experienced career policeman. It is his responsibility to proactively prevent crime, and reactively arrest perpetrators’.
But it is the City and Province’s job to address the culture of gangsterism by implementing programmes to transform unjust landscapes and address the social engineering integral to apartheid’s crimes against humanity –that remain integral to the shape of the city today.
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