GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General
01 July 2025
Gun violence continues to plague the Western Cape, and the City of Cape Town remains disturbingly unprepared, and seemingly unwilling, to confront the root causes of the crisis.
In June, seven people were gunned down in a mass shooting at a home in the Kanana Informal Settlement, Gugulethu. In a separate incident in White City, Nyanga, two men were murdered in cold blood. Just days earlier, the bodies of three men were discovered in Samora Machel. These are not isolated incidents, they are symptoms of a deepening urban crisis rooted in inequality, spatial injustice, and the persistent failure of leadership.
According to the Western Cape’s Q4 Crime Statistics (January–March 2025), 1,068 people were murdered in the Province in just three months, an average of over 11 killings per day. Firearms were the weapon of choice in more than half of all murders (55.6% or 590 cases). The City of Cape Town accounted for 197 of the 208 gang-related murders in the Western Cape, and a staggering 82% of the national total of 240.
The following Q4 mass killings illustrate the sheer brutality of this crisis:
- Philippi East: Five men found shot and burnt next to a flaming vehicle in Betterlife; a woman hit by a stray bullet.
- Samora Machel: Three men shot dead in what police suspect was extortion-related violence.
- Lwandle: Three people killed, two women and one man, in two separate attacks, both linked to extortion and revenge.
- Khayelitsha: Three men shot dead, and another wounded, in a drug-related shooting in Site C.
Cape Town is caught in a violent, unequal cycle. And yet, there is no meaningful strategy, nor political will, from the City to tackle the scourge of urban gang violence.
The Cape Flats have effectively become a walled city without a physical wall, a space deliberately designed to exclude, entrap, and divide. These invisible walls keep residents locked into generational poverty and gang vulnerability. This is not just a policing issue. It is a planning issue. A social justice issue.
Instead of redressing the spatial injustices of apartheid, the DA-led City under Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is reinforcing them. The latest amendment to the Municipal Planning By-Law introduces a so-called “Affordable Rental Units Overlay Zone”, which allows property owners to build up to 12 rental units but only in historically Black and Coloured communities like the Cape Flats. Meanwhile, historically white and well-located suburbs, such as the Cape Town CBD, the Atlantic Seaboard, and most of the southern suburbs are conspicuously excluded.
Cape Town has ample well-located, publicly owned land that could be used for integrated, affordable housing. What it lacks is the political courage to use it.
Cape Town deserves more than talk of safety and opportunity. It deserves leadership that is bold enough to dismantle the spatial and social legacy of apartheid, not repackage it.