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 was robbed at gunpoint while using a communal toilet one night. She lives in a shantytown known as Taiwan, on the edge of Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township – a place where a private toilet is considered a luxury.
Jolingana works as a nurse’s assistant, and with her public servant’s salary, she is one of the few in the informal settlement who can afford indoor plumbing. Meanwhile, her neighbours rely on a row of outdoor toilets supplied by city authorities at a rate of about one cubicle per every 10 households. For Jolingana, these public facilities are a constant reminder of the municipality’s broken promises regarding basic services.
The lack of services in the settlement has again come under scrutiny after Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis announced controversial plans to build a wall to deter criminals along the N2 highway, which abuts a series of townships and Cape Town International Airport. Jolingana remarked, “I’m surprised they’ve got money for a wall but no money to buy land,” referring to longstanding promises to relocate her community to an area with proper housing.
Her dissatisfaction with services in Khayelitsha is so profound that she only accepts work in better-equipped, formerly white suburbs through her employment agency. When her five-year-old son falls ill, she travels over 20km to Bellville – one such suburb – to avoid the long queues and overcrowding at the nearest day hospital. She states, “At the trauma ward, you will see people lying on the floor, sitting since yesterday, so I can’t take it.”
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. However, local media reports suggest the project could actually cost as much as 180 million rand ($10.8m). Besides the wall, the project includes security cameras, improved lighting, safety barriers for recreational spaces, and metro police patrols, the mayor said.
Khayelitsha and surrounding townships have long been plagued by crime, recently prompting President Cyril Ramaphosa to deploy the army to curb a wave of gang-related violence in the Western Cape, but residents argue that authorities only pay attention when middle-class motorists are victimized. A December incident drew national headlines after robbers stabbed retired white teacher Karin van Aardt, 64, to death on the notorious N2 road shortly after she and her husband landed in Cape Town for a holiday from another province.
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 remains a tiny fraction of crimes reported nationwide in South Africa, which has one of the highest crime and murder rates globally.
Source: www.aljazeera.com