In the suburbs of Cape Town, near the spot where an anti-gang police commander was riddled with bullets by a gunman outside his own home, a fortress-like building now looms above the Bishop Lavis neighbourhood.
By disentangling itself from the national government, Cape Town has managed to avoid the worst of the electricity shortages that have heavily damaged the national economy. Murder rates have fallen in most neighbourhoods where the new law-enforcement units are deployed. Rail services work better in Cape Town than in most other South African cities.
“You can design devolution so that it naturally leads to secession, and that’s a big risk,” he said. “It becomes more and more tempting. One province has the resources and private capital for devolution, but other provinces don’t have access to that equity and capital.”Cape Town’s mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, acknowledges that devolution could have a “short term effect” of widening the economic gaps among South Africa’s cities and regions.
Visits to LEAP bases make it clear that the officers are keenly alert to the threat from the street gangs, whose leaders have exploited South Africa’s high unemployment and poverty rates to recruit jobless youths. “Hanover Park is known as an area with a lot of shootings, a lot of crossfire injuries and even killings of innocent people, so to take a firearm off the street is the biggest achievement we can do,” he told The Globe.
The national government could easily pass a law to allow LEAP officers to do investigations, Mr. Winde said. “Bheki Cele finds every excuse in the book to tell us that’s not possible,” he said. The biggest test of devolution is the electricity issue. South Africans this year have suffered as much as 10 hours of power blackouts daily. The rationing, known euphemistically as “loadshedding,” is imposed in escalating stages that climbed as high as Stage 6 this year.