During the State of the Nation Address (SONA) on the 12 February 2026, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced, to an unusually collective thunderous parliamentary benches applause, that the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) would be deployed to identified criminal hotspots in support of the South African Police Service (SAPS). The announcement came out more than a customary line in a speech and landed as an acknowledgment that in some parts of South Africa, the state must respond with urgency.
The deployment of the SANDF, as the President indicated, will focus on gang violence and drug trafficking and use in the Western and Eastern Cape, and on illegal mining and organised criminal syndicates in Gauteng. For many communities of Langlaagte, Riverlea, Selby, Florida, Cleveland and Randfontein including many other towns and townships in Gauteng, who have lived for months under the shadow of heavily armed zama-zamas and hijacking of buildings amongst other criminal acts, this intervention cannot come soon enough.
The same sense of relief is likely to be felt in the Northern Suburbs of Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth) in the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape’s Cape Flats, where violent gangsterism has devastated families and destabilised entire neighbourhoods. In Mthatha, emerging entrepreneurs and small business owners who have been terrorised by extortion networks demanding protection fees, therefore suffocating local economic growth before it can take root, this intervention could not have come at a better time.
For all these communities, whose nights are constantly punctuated by gunfire, these are not isolated criminal acts; they are sustained patterns of intimidation of the country’s citizens. Therefore, the presence of disciplined, uniformed soldiers alongside police officers will not be an abstract show of force, but it will be a psychological and practical reprieve.
However, we need to be clear about what this deployment is, and what it is not.
It is common cause that the SANDF does not have arresting powers. It is also acknowledged that soldiers are not meant to replace police officers, in that, Infantry Platoons on patrol are not detectives but serve as a force multiplier. The role of the SANDF will be to support the police through visible deterrence, secure perimeters, reinforce operations, and further strengthen the SAPS’s intelligence gathering capability. The SANDF will augment the SAPS’s crime intelligence through disciplined information gathering and analysis using its structured defence and military police intelligence capabilities.
Whilst this deployment is not about militarising communities and addressing of the root causes of crime in our communities overnight, it is about reinforcing the state’s capacity where it is under strain. If it is implemented responsibly and alongside the much-needed deeper structural reforms (easing unemployment, poverty, unequal access to economic opportunities, for example), the deployment will offer something communities desperately need, which is breathing space, renewed confidence in the state, and the reassurance that the Republic has not abandoned its people.
This deployment of the SANDF also finds expression in the South African Constitution in Section 200(2), which affirms that the primary object of the defence force is to defend and protect the Republic and its people. When communities are effectively besieged by organised violence, their protection by the state through any means, including this deployment becomes a constitutional imperative.
Whilst this deployment is welcome, as the people and country, we must remain grounded in seeking sustainable solutions in resolving the structural roots of crime, unemployment, inequality, substance abuse and historic spatial injustices, because the sustainable safety of our communities requires long-term social and economic reforms. This immediate security intervention is therefore not a substitute for sustainable structural reforms, but it is a prerequisite for it.
Whilst the SANDF deployment will also be a reprieve to soldiers who are ordinarily confined to military barracks doing base fatigues and re-training, carefully managed domestic operations like this one will allow them to maintain operational readiness in complex urban environments and operations other than war (OOTW).
Whilst politicians and other commentators debate the pros and cons of the SANDF deployment in our townships, for the mother in Riverlea, the shopkeeper in Mthatha, or the family in the Northern Suburbs of Gqeberha, this deployment is not about political optics, it is about safety, dignity and the simple hope of uninterrupted sleep.
Lt Col (Rtd) Baliwinile Kwankwa (SA Army Int C) writes in his personal capacity
