‘Segregation’: Multimillion-dollar crime wall causes uproar in S Africa

Cape Town, South Africa – Thandi Jolingana, 46, beams with pride as she shows off the bathroom she built in her corrugated iron shack, after her husband went out to relieve himself at the communal toilet one night and was robbed at gunpoint.

Jolingana lives in a shantytown known as Taiwan, on the edge of Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township – a place where a private toilet is a luxury.

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“I’m a rich girl,” she jokes, pointing out that she could be living more comfortably, were it not for the several unemployed relatives she has to support financially, in addition to her two children.

Jolingana works as a nurse’s assistant. With her public servant’s salary, she is one of the few in the informal settlement who can afford indoor plumbing. Meanwhile, her neighbours make use of a row of outdoor toilets that city authorities supply at the rate of about one cubicle per every 10 households. For Jolingana, the public facilities are a constant reminder of the municipality’s broken promises.

The lack of services in the settlement has again come under the spotlight after Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis announced controversial plans to build a wall to keep criminals at bay along the N2 highway, which abuts a series of townships, along with Cape Town International Airport.

“I’m surprised they’ve got money for a wall but no money to buy land,” Jolingana said, referring to promises to relocate her community to an area where they would be provided with proper housing.

Such is her unhappiness with services in Khayelitsha that she only accepts work in better-equipped, formerly white suburbs via the agency that employs her. When her five-year-old son is ill, she travels more than 20km (12 miles) to Bellville – one such formerly white-only suburb – to avoid long queues and overcrowding at the nearest day hospital.

“At [the] trauma [ward], you will see the people lying on the floor, sitting since yesterday, so I can’t take it,” she says.

Guiding Al Jazeera through a maze of narrow alleys in the township, Jolingana illustrates the health and safety risks of the existing facilities. At a row of communal toilets about 50 metres (164 feet) from her home, residents installed a cement foundation under the toilets after one toppled over in 2018, trapping a woman inside. The structures are also vulnerable to the flooding that spills into the settlement from the surrounding wetlands each winter, she says.

Residents say the city’s money should be used to fix problems like these, instead of building a costly wall.

Thandi Jolingana shows a row of communal toilets in the Taiwan informal settlement in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, that most residents rely on [Otha Fadana/Al Jazeera]

Mayor Hill-Lewis, a member of the Democratic Alliance (DA) party that is part of the national unity government (GNU), told the city council on January 29 that Cape Town intends to spend 108 million rand ($6.5m) on the crime-fighting initiative known as the N2 Edge project. But local media reports say the project could actually cost as much as 180 million rand ($10.8m).

Besides the wall, the project also includes security cameras, improved lighting, safety barriers for recreational spaces, and metro police patrols, the mayor said.

‘A far bigger problem’

Khayelitsha and surrounding townships have long been plagued by crime, recently prompting President Cyril Ramaphosa to deploy the army to staunch a wave of gang-related violence in the Western Cape, but residents say authorities only pay attention when middle-class motorists are the victims.

One particular incident in December drew national headlines after robbers stabbed a retired white teacher, Karin van Aardt, 64, to death on the notorious N2 road shortly after she and her husband had landed in Cape Town for a holiday from another province.

Weeks before, members of parliament had spoken out about the dangers travellers to Cape Town face near the airport.

Liezl van der Merwe, an MP from the Inkatha Freedom Party, which is part of the GNU, called for visible policing at traffic lights and intersections known to be crime hotspots, while another coalition partner, the Freedom Front Plus, wanted damaged highway fencing to be repaired, faulty security cameras to be restored and permanent armed patrols to be dispatched to high-risk areas.

“The problem is far bigger and stretches much wider, though,” FF Plus party leader Pieter Mulder said. “The murder and crime wave at the airport is indicative of what is happening around the country.”

According to official statistics presented in parliament, 42 criminal cases were reported to police at Cape Town International Airport between April 1, 2024 and March 31, 2025.

The Western Cape spokesperson for the South African National Roads Agency also told local media last year that along the N2 and nearby R300 freeway, the agency had recorded 564 crime-related events in 2024, and 362 between January and August 2025.

This is still a tiny fraction of the crimes reported nationwide in South Africa, which has one of the highest crime and murder rates in the world outside a war zone.

Five of the 10 cities with the highest crime rates worldwide are found in South Africa, according to Statista.

South Africa’s ‘Berlin Wall’

Still, Mayor Hill-Lewis drew widespread condemnation when he announced his security response in January, with critics accusing him of avoiding the social issues facing shack dwellers.

The wall, in particular, came under fire.

The structure is expected to be three metres (10 feet) high and span a nine-kilometre (5.6 mile) stretch from the airport, which has been dubbed “the hell run” after years of violent attacks along this route.

Members of the African National Congress (ANC), the leading party in the GNU, also criticised the plans.

Ndithini Tyhido, the ANC’s top council official in Cape Town, criticised Hill-Lewis for planning to build the “South African Berlin Wall” and urged the government to invest the money in community-based crime prevention, such as increasing stipends for neighbourhood watch groups, instead.

Councillor Chad Davids from the Good Party, another GNU member, said the city was “rich on paper, administratively broken, and morally confused in its priorities”.

“We are told budgets are ‘record-breaking’, yet clinics remain incomplete, fire stations are delayed, housing developments are stalled, roads are unfinished, and community facilities are deteriorating,” he said.

A view of the Taiwan informal settlement. Cape Town already suffers from some of the highest levels of inequality in the world [Otha Fadana/Al Jazeera]

Housing backlog

The City of Cape Town has won plaudits for good governance and stellar service delivery in the wealthy city centre, where tourists enjoy its first-world amenities.

But critics say its track record with Black township residents has been patchy, much like that of the ANC-led national government.

In 2010, the ANC’s Youth League lodged a complaint with the South African Human Rights Commission after the city installed unenclosed toilets in another informal settlement in Khayelitsha, known as Makhaza.

The toilets were meant to be temporary while the city completed a housing project, but a dispute broke out after a group of residents refused to enclose the toilets themselves, as had been agreed with community leaders.

A court eventually forced the city to pay for the enclosures.

The city has also been criticised for its slow response to a housing backlog in places like Khayelitsha, where Jolingana has lived in a shack since 1987.

Talks about a housing project to accommodate Taiwan residents began in 2016, and aimed to relocate 4,500 households.

A community steering committee was formed two years later to guide the process, but Jolingana, a member of the committee, says a city official only attended a meeting last year for the first time and promised that the move would start in February this year.

So far, that hasn’t happened.

Pensioner Nomqondiso Ntsethe lives in a shack in Taiwan with 13 children and grandchildren [Otha Fadana/Al Jazeera]

‘It’s a political game’

Cape Town’s poorer residents accuse the local government of favouring its political strongholds when it comes to the allocation of resources such as housing – especially those living in historically white and “Coloured” neighbourhoods.

This perception is fuelled by the fact that the City of Cape Town is run by the mostly white DA party in one of only two provinces that have escaped the national dominance of the ANC, the party that led South Africa out of racist apartheid rule and into democracy in 1994.

“If the city is saying they’re building the wall to protect people of the N2, why can’t they take the people out of the area to a place where there’s no crime?” asked Nomqondiso Ntsethe, a 65-year-old pensioner, who shares a shack in Taiwan with 13 children and grandchildren.

“It’s a political game,” she said. “They’re separating the poor from the rich. It’s segregation.”

The City of Cape Town referred Al Jazeera’s questions about the Taiwan housing project to the provincial government, which in turn said it handed the project over to the city in September 2024.

Mayor Hill-Lewis, who last year put the city’s housing backlog at about 600,000, has remained defiant amid the latest criticism.

On February 8, he posted a video on X showing a broken-down fence alongside the N2 highway and criticised the police and the country’s road management agency for failing to keep surrounding communities safe.

“This barrier was built 20 years ago when the ANC was in charge of Cape Town – the same party now hysterically and hypocritically shouting about our plan to fix the security barrier to keep the people of Cape Town safer,” he said.

The video also featured residents from a nearby informal settlement who supported the idea of erecting a wall next to their dwellings.

While the debate about his efforts continues to rage online, Jolingana and her neighbours are gearing up for a fight to oppose the wall.

The Informal Settlements Forum, a local coalition, issued a rallying cry this week, calling on civil society groups to join their “peaceful protest against policies that undermine dignity and equality”.

It also appealed to law firms and legal practitioners to provide pro bono assistance in their battle “to ensure transparency, accountability and lawful governance”.

Meanwhile, Jolingana lives with daily reminders of the life she could have had.

“Even at work, my colleagues always ask, ‘When are you going to buy a car?’ They don’t know my situation. I always say that ‘If you can wear my shoes, I don’t think it will fit you,’” she said.

“In Jesus’s name, I can cope, because there’s no other way. Yes, there’s no other way. I’m coping.”