South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced Thursday that he will send the military into the streets to support police in fighting criminal gangs and illegal mining operations — an escalation that amounts to a concession: the state has lost control.
The deployment, revealed during Ramaphosa's annual State of the Nation Address to parliament, will target Western Cape and Gauteng provinces. He directed the chiefs of the police and army to draw up a plan on where security forces should be deployed "within the next few days."
Ramaphosa did not mince words about the scale of the crisis:
"Organised crime is now the most immediate threat to our democracy, our society and our economic development."
According to the BBC, between April and September of last year, police data showed an average of 63 people killed per day in South Africa. That is not a typo. Sixty-three human beings, every single day, for six months.
A Government Admitting What Everyone Already Knew
The military deployment didn't materialize out of nowhere. Just last month, Police Minister Firoz Cachalia acknowledged that the country's police were not yet able to defeat the deadly criminal gangs. When your own police minister publicly concedes the police cannot do the job, sending in soldiers isn't bold leadership — it's the only option left.
Ramaphosa painted a grim picture of what South Africans are living through:
"Children here in the Western Cape are caught in the crossfire of gang wars. People are chased out of their homes by illegal miners in Gauteng."
Alongside the military deployment, Ramaphosa announced a package of additional measures: recruiting 5,500 new police officers, strengthening intelligence capabilities, and targeting crime syndicates. On paper, it sounds comprehensive. In practice, these are the kinds of promises South African leaders have been making for years while the body count climbs.
The Predictable Collapse of Law and Order
South Africa's descent into endemic violence is not a mystery. It is the entirely foreseeable result of decades of governance that prioritized ideological projects over the basic functions of the state, chief among them, keeping citizens alive.
The illegal mining crisis is a case study. Armed foreign nationals have moved into South African mining communities, displacing residents and operating with near-impunity. The state allowed this to metastasize. Border enforcement deteriorated. Policing collapsed. Criminal networks filled the vacuum. Now the army has to clean up what functioning institutions would have prevented.
This is the pattern across much of the developing world, and it carries a lesson that Western nations would do well to internalize: when governments treat law enforcement as optional or politically inconvenient, criminal organizations treat the entire country as an opportunity. Gangs don't flourish because police are too aggressive. They flourish because the state retreats.
Troops in the Streets are a Symptom, Not a Solution
Military deployments to suppress domestic crime have a mixed record everywhere they've been tried — from Mexico's cartel wars to the favelas of Brazil. Soldiers are trained to fight wars, not conduct investigations, gather intelligence on gang hierarchies, or build prosecutable cases. They can hold ground. They can project force. What they cannot do is replace the patient, the difficult, unglamorous work of effective policing and prosecution.
Ramaphosa's plan to recruit 5,500 new officers at least gestures toward the structural problem. But recruiting bodies is not the same as building capable institutions. South Africa's police forces have been plagued by corruption, low morale, and chronic underfunding. Adding headcount without addressing the rot simply means more officers operating inside a broken system.
The real question is whether the Ramaphosa government has the political will to do what actually reduces violent crime: aggressive prosecution, long sentences for gang leaders, dismantling criminal financial networks, and — critically — enforcing borders so that armed foreign criminal enterprises cannot simply walk into the country and set up shop.
What Happens When Government Fails Its Core Mission
Sixty-three people are killed per day. That number should dominate every conversation about South Africa's trajectory. It represents a state failing at the most fundamental obligation any government holds — protecting the lives of its people.
Ramaphosa called organized crime the most immediate threat to South Africa's democracy, society, and economic development. He's right. But threats of this magnitude don't appear overnight. They grow in the space that incompetent governance leaves behind. They thrive where political leaders spend decades debating policy abstractions while citizens bury their children.
The troops will deploy. The plans will be drawn up. The question South Africans are asking — the one their government has yet to answer convincingly — is whether this time will be any different from every other time their leaders promised the violence would stop.
The gangs will be watching to find out.
