Cape Town’s plans to build a wall to prevent attacks on the airport highway have divided South Africa’s tourist hotspot, with critics calling it an apartheid throwback to hide poverty.
The nearly 9km wall would separate part of the road that leads in from the international airport from the packed, impoverished settlements that line the route. Attacks — some deadly — have been reported for years along the busy multi-lane route, including hijackings and smash-and-grab ambushes.
“They’ll come with a stone and break the windscreen,” e-hailing driver Mustafa Hashim said, recounting stories of attacks on the corridor known as the “N2 hell run.”
Photo: Reuters
“If you want to keep your life, then you just leave them to take whatever they want,” Hashim said.
The city announced the 114 million rand (US$7 million) N2 Edge safety project in December last year, shortly after a woman was fatally stabbed at a traffic light just off the highway after leaving the airport complex.
The key feature is a 3m “safety barrier” to reinforce a broken concrete palisade fence, which aims to keep the road clear of criminals, pedestrians and animals.
“Literally hundreds of thousands of people a day use that road, and many of them feel unsafe,” Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said, adding that most were local commuters.
Residents of the Nyanga informal settlement that would fall behind the highway wall said they are victims of the same crimes reported on the road, but the new barrier would do nothing to help them.
The attackers just disappear into the maze of shacks, resident Linda Monakali said.
“This wall will assist the motorists, but for us, the perpetrators will be with us,” she said.
Between October and December last year, the Nyanga Police Station reported the highest number of robberies with aggravating circumstances in the country, police statistics showed.
The station was also listed as the second-highest for murders, seeing a 29 percent increase compared with the previous quarter.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced the imminent deployment of the army to parts of the city gripped by bloody gang wars.
City authorities should work out “how can we ensure we better our living environment rather than thinking of building a security wall on the N2,” Nyanga Community Policing Forum chairman Dumisani Qwebe said.
That included 24-hour surveillance cameras and decent sanitation, with women particularly at risk of sexual violence when they use outside toilets at night.
“Walls might stop bullets, but it doesn’t stop crime,” city councilor Jonathan Cupido said.
The city’s government — led by the Democratic Alliance (DA) party — is “trying to hide what we cannot fix,” Cupido said.
Thirty years after the end of white-minority rule, disparities between Cape Town’s formerly segregated white and black areas are stark, with the city’s DA authorities accused of not doing enough tackle the imbalance.
Anger over the N2 wall dominated the Cape Town Pride mardi gras this month where activists called on the city to address its deepening housing crisis instead.
“They are trying to build a wall behind which they are trying to hide the poor,” former anti-apartheid activist and cleric Allan Boesak said, calling it an “apartheid wall.”
“They are trying to hide the fact that there is indeed a black Cape Town and a white Cape Town — a privileged Cape Town and a privileged-deprived Cape Town,” he said.
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