PROTEST ACTION The Economic Freedom Fighters marched through Salt River, igniting hope and commitment against gangsterism and drugs while prioritising community safety in the face of systemic failures.
Image: Supplied
On Sunday 30 August 2026 I walked through Salt River together with leaders and members of the Economic Freedom Fighters as part of a walkabout organised by the community organisation People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD).
I did not go as a tourist in someone else's pain. I went as a Fighter — as a member of a revolutionary movement that has placed the fight against crime, drugs and gangsterism inside a programme of community development, public safety and transformation, not as a weekend slogan.
I also went as a Member of Parliament who sits on the Portfolio Committee on Defence and Military Veterans, the Joint Standing Committee on Defence and the Portfolio Committee on Correctional Services. Those committees sharpen what I already know as an EFF member: the devastation is real, the official response is inadequate, and only an organised political programme rooted in communities can change it.
Salt River is not an abstraction. It is streets where children still play within earshot of dealers, where mothers lock doors that no lock can really secure, and where the language of turf, debt and revenge has become more fluent than the language of hope. Across the Cape Town metro the same occupation repeats itself in Mitchells Plain, Philippi, Manenberg, Hanover Park, Delft, Atlantis and too many other working-class communities.
Gangsterism and drugs recruit the unemployed youth that apartheid spatial planning and three decades of unfinished transformation left stranded. They turn corners into markets and funerals into routine. They hollow out families, schools and the dignity of entire neighbourhoods.
That is precisely the crisis the EFF's 2026 local government programme was written to confront. We do not treat safety as an afterthought to "service delivery." We treat it as inseparable from how a municipality designs public space, enforces by-laws, works with residents, and attacks the social decay that feeds the dealer and the gang. I walked in Salt River because that programme is not a document for launch rallies. It is a commitment Fighters are already carrying into communities that have been told, for years, to wait.
That is also why PAGAD still matters, whatever one thinks of its most violent chapters in the late 1990s. For thirty years this community organisation has refused to treat gangsterism and drugs as a private misfortune or a policing statistic. It has named the scourge in public, marched to the doors of those who profit from it, and insisted that residents are not spectators in their own destruction. Communities that the official machinery of the state has too often treated as afterthoughts found in PAGAD a language of refusal.
The EFF did not walk beside that language as a borrowed costume. We walked because our manifesto itself insists that municipalities must work with community safety structures, not lecture them from a distance, and must combat the networks that prey on informal traders, township businesses, construction sites, transport routes and the most vulnerable streets.
The large number of EFF members who turned out was not a coincidence. Fighters understand that you cannot arrest your way out of a city that still reproduces the geography of apartheid: townships and working-class suburbs cut off from work, from decent schools, from safe public space, while a glossy brochure city is marketed to the world. The Democratic Alliance has governed Cape Town long enough to be judged by results.
Those results include the persistence of the spatial order that feeds gangs and drug markets. Policing without transformation is a holding operation. Transformation without community power is a slogan. The EFF is the only party whose local government approach binds crime-fighting to community policing, to the upliftment and professionalisation of the police, to consequence management for corruption, and to the social programmes without which every raid is temporary.
From the committees on which I serve, I see the wreckage at both ends of the pipeline — and I see why an EFF municipality cannot outsource this fight to Pretoria's press statements. In Correctional Services one meets the young men, and increasingly the young women, for whom the gang and the drug house were the only employers that ever came looking. One sees how prison gangs extend the same economy of fear that already rules certain streets. That is why our local government commitments include not only enforcement, but rehabilitation centres and community-based programmes against substance abuse, especially among young people in identified hotspots across townships and metros. A municipality that only confiscates and never rebuilds is managing symptoms.
On the Defence committees one sees what happens when the state, having failed at ordinary policing, reaches for the South African National Defence Force as an emergency patch. The EFF supported Operation Prosper as a short-term emergency measure: soldiers deployed to assist the South African Police Service against organised crime, drugs and gangsterism when communities were bleeding faster than the police could respond. We supported it as Fighters who refuse to abandon people under fire. We did not support it as a substitute for the political programme we will implement in local government.
I was part of the joint oversight visit of the Joint Standing Committee on Defence and the Portfolio Committee on Police on Friday, 14 August 2026, to Mitchells Plain and the surrounding Cape Flats area of operations — including engagements at Mitchells Plain Police Station and Lentegeur Police Station with the Anti-Gang Unit, the Tactical Response Team, deployed SANDF members and the Community Policing Forum. That visit confirmed what residents already knew, and what our manifesto anticipated. An operation meant to strike at networks too often drifted toward visible but secondary targets. Soldiers and police cannot dismantle a political economy of poverty, guns and captured corners if intelligence is thin, coordination is weak, and communities are treated as terrain rather than partners.
Community representatives in Mitchells Plain asked, plainly, what happens when the soldiers leave. Military deployment can buy time. It cannot replace the Safer Municipality work the EFF has committed to: crime prevention joined to by-law enforcement and safer public spaces; strengthened local crime-prevention forums in the places that already bleed, including Mitchells Plain and Philippi; modern tools — cameras, drones, gunshot detection, real-time monitoring — that serve residents rather than a public-relations dashboard; and municipal courts so that by-laws are not a dead letter.
None of that will mean anything while corruption inside the South African Police Service is treated as an awkward aside. It is not a rumour. It is a lived reality where the same faces who sell the product appear to enjoy a mysterious immunity, where information leaks before a raid, and where honest officers are left isolated. Metropolitan police structures, including those of the City of Cape Town, have not broken this pattern. Visible patrols and branded vehicles are not the same thing as taking on the networks that own the night. The EFF's position, written into how we intend to govern, is simple: there can be no credible war on gangs while there is no war on police corruption. Consequence management is the difference between a public service and a protection racket wearing a uniform. We will work with the SAPS. We will not romanticise it. We will demand that it be cleaned, supported and held to account.
Gangs and drugs also feed on teenage despair, gender-based violence and the collapse of ordinary care. That is why the EFF's local government programme does not separate public safety from social development. Campaigns against drugs, teenage pregnancy, gender-based violence and social decay; family support and social cohesion; work with schools, clinics, civil society and community organisations so that awareness is not a once-off pamphlet — these are not soft extras. They are how you stop recruiting the next generation into the same funeral register.
I walked in Salt River as a member of the EFF also because I know the quality of our candidate for the Cape Town metro. Comrade Nontando Nolutshungu is not a visitor to the argument about working-class life. As National Chairperson she carries organisational authority and a record of political work that does not treat the Cape Flats as a backdrop for other people's elections. Experience without commitment is careerism. Commitment without experience is noise.
In her the movement has both. That is why Fighters showed up in numbers. They showed up to stand behind a candidate and a manifesto that treat Salt River, Philippi and Mitchells Plain as places to be governed with seriousness, not as crime statistics to be managed until the next election.
PAGAD's demand, that communities will not co-exist quietly with the people who poison them — is a demand the state should have made its own long ago. Our presence was an act of solidarity with that demand, and an act of political responsibility: not a blank cheque for methods that replace law with spectacle, but a public statement that the EFF will implement, in local government, the organised community safety, the attack on criminal networks, the rehabilitation of the young, and the consequence management that official Cape Town has failed to deliver.
We in the EFF are grassroots, community-based revolutionary political animals. Once we have an issue between our teeth, we do not let go. We do so as Fighters, bound to a clear programme. This issue has been between the teeth of Cape Town's working-class communities for a generation. On Sunday we walked because walking is the beginning of refusing to look away — and because the EFF's local government manifesto is the instrument through which that refusal becomes policy, budgets, forums, cameras, courts, clinics and organised people. The EFF will continue that work in the streets, in the committees of Parliament, and at the ballot box: not as a performance of concern, but as the implementation of a programme to make safety, dignity and consequence management real.
That is the practical plan the Economic Freedom Fighters stand for, and it is the plan expressed in our Local Government Elections Manifesto. A grassroots, community-based programme is the only way to fight gangsterism and drug peddling. The uncompromising struggle to achieve this community-rooted objective continues.
A Luta Continua!
Ambassador Carl Niehaus is an EFF Member of Parliament. He serves on the Portfolio Committee on Defence and Military Veterans and the Joint Standing Committee on Defence as well as on the Portfolio Committee on Correctional Services.
