”Give me 10 more vehicles and 85 extra cops on the beat and I will take Nyanga off the number one murder spot in the country.”
Assistant commissioner Manyano Noqayi of Nyanga police station was speaking this week after the area was, for the second consecutive year, named the neighbourhood with the highest number of murders in the country.
Crime statistics show the murder rate in the Western Cape is 2,5% higher than last year, with 303 murders reported in Nyanga in the past 11 months.
Three months ago Noqayi was tasked with policing the murder capital of South Africa. ”As a priority we need to close down the known 558 illegal liquor outlets in Nyanga and only then can we start talking about turning around the crime problem,” said Noqayi. He estimated that 90% of all murders, rapes and assaults in Nyanga were alcohol related.
Noqayi said tik (methamphetamine) was playing an increasing role in violent crimes in the area. ”We estimate that about 95% of all murders and rapes happen between people known to each other and, while alcohol is the main substance of abuse, tik is increasingly involved — especially where rapes also occur,” he said.
Resident Nomsa Kelem was born in Nyanga and, 29 years later, she still hates living there. ”We’re murdered by drunk kids in Nyanga. My neighbour was shot, killed and robbed for R12 cash and a pair of shoes by a gang of 15-year-old boys and the police couldn’t get here because their cars can’t drive between our shacks,” said Kelem, who lives in Brown’s Farm.
Kelem and her family are desperate to leave, but they have no idea where else to put up their shack. ”We stay here because we’re unemployed and if you live in a shack it doesn’t matter where you live — it’s all the same. The criminals find you and kill you and the plastic walls of your house can’t protect you and neither can the cops,” she said.
Kelem is one of 400 000 people officially known to be living in Nyanga. However, Noqayi reckoned the population was closer to a million. ”There’s about 10 people living in each shack — we work on the figure of policing close to a million people,” he said. If Noqayi is correct, the police to resident ratio is one police officer for every 4 000 residents.
Noqayi acknowledged that large parts of Nyanga were not accessible by vehicle: ”One of the most outstanding aspects of Nyanga is the lack of formal houses. By far the majority of dwellings are shacks and we have a disproportionate number of illegal shebeens; most of the murders happen at these places where liquor is sold, either when people are on their way to shebeens or when they leave these places.”
Another problem, said Noqayi, was that the community still saw the police as the enemy. ”The community is not involved yet in fighting crime. People are too scared to assist us and they’ve not bought into the concept of working with the cops.”
Noqayi said a large percentage of the murder victims were killed by gangs of youths between 14 and 17 years old. There were no sports facilities and hardly any shops. Some streets were strewn with rubbish, rocks and pieces of concrete, that the community had piled up to keep vehicles out, deliberately turning them into no-go zones to try to keep out criminal elements.