Too Chicken to solve the problem?

ALTHOUGH I’ve not had the pleasure, I gather Chicken is the sort of person you don’t want to meet in a dark alley late at night – or even on a wide boulevard on a sunny day.

A member of the Americans gang, Chicken attended a peace meeting in Manenberg on Thursday and, on behalf of his own bunch and their traditional rivals, the Hard Livings, apologised for the killings and trauma they’ve caused in recent months.

Chicken told the meeting that both gangs had come together to discuss the violence. “I told my brothers there are laaities affected and this thing cannot continue,” he was quoted by the Cape Times as saying. “We all need peace. I grew up in Manenberg and people know me. This is not about me, the Americans or the Hard Livings. It is about the people of Manenberg.”

Who, it must be said, are quite gatvol with Chicken and his brothers’ behaviour. As one resident pointed out, it was going to take more than a promise to stop shooting before the gangsters earned their respect. “We will not let you off so easily,” Melanie Manuel reportedly told Chicken. “Children have suffered and are suffering. People have been injured and children have seen these things happen. This community is traumatised. We feel you must hear the heartache of residents. You must remember this is a memory that will not go away. You must know how you hurt us.”

As wary as residents may be of men like Chicken, there is a feeling, here at the Mahogany Ridge, that the gangsters have, through their actions this week, shown the people of Manenberg a little more respect and consideration than the politicians.

Last weekend, after gang-related violence prompted the temporary closure of 16 schools in the area, the Western Cape government announced that it would be diverting R6 million from its Education Department to the City of Cape Town in a bid to curb the fighting. At the same time – and presumably because it was, if I may say so, the Rondebosch thing to do – the premier, Helen Zille, and her Social Development minister, Albert Fritz, made use of the opportunity to issue a lengthy statement detailing the Western Cape’s interventions in drug and alcohol-related abuse.

Nowhere was the connection made between prohibition and the rise of the gangs, but that was to be expected. Given the lack of bottle in this regard, it is going to be a while before we have a serious debate on decriminalisation.

The reaction to all this was perhaps more noisome than usual.

The ANC’s Western Cape leader, Marius Fransman, came over all bothered in an outrage-by-numbers outburst and called on Zille to resign at once. Tony Ehrenreich, Cosatu’s provincial secretary, was just as idiotic and suggested the church should step in “and unite the people in confronting this crisis”.

Then Zille, with Community Safety MEC Dan Plato, Mayor Patricia de Lille and mayoral committee member for Safety and Security JP Smith, met Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa to discuss the interventions needed in these “hot spots”.

It was a waste of time – and because of the petty, factional, closed-minded and divisive nature of South African politics, it will always be thus. Mthethwa is a member of a ruling party that has no interest whatsoever in the people of Cape Town and the welfare of the province as long as it is run by a party other than themselves. It is that simple.

For its part, the province wants the re-establishment of specialised police units to fight the gangs and the deployment of a temporary SANDF peacekeeping force so that the police can be freed up to bring gangsters like Chicken to book.

This of course would only be the first step towards combating a deeprooted problem.

As De Lille put it: “We agree that the approach to deal with gangs and drugs is not just a response of Safety and Security, but it must be a multidisciplinary approach, including Social Development, Health and other departments within government.”

But Mthethwa won’t help. Like a stuck record, he continues to insist that the police are already doing what is needed to tackle gang violence in the Western Cape. Unsurprisingly, he appears to have no clue what this is exactly and, possibly because he’s simply unable to do so, he refuses to reveal the police’s gang-fighting strategies.

When, however, it comes to waffling on about addressing “socio-economic conditions”, he does so with aplomb, much like a drunk undergraduate.

Meanwhile, Manenberg suffers at the hands of cynical, self-centred politicians.