Managing the challenges that allow full exploitation of the advantages of urbanisation is, however, not just a planning problem. Development solutions hinge on having appropriate skills and investing in creating such skills. They also require improving security and ensuring the rule of law. Poor security works directly against the advantages of urbanisation, since the answer to poor security in the cities is to keep people apart, behind high walls or on separate transport systems.
As noted in the Preface, Africa is the most violent continent in the world, experiencing two-thirds of non-state fatalities worldwide.22 The Ibrahim Index of African Governance for 2016 notes that weaknesses in the provision of safety and the rule of law on the continent have ‘held back further governance progress’. Some 33 countries ‘have experienced a decline in safety and rule of law since 2006, 15 of them quite substantially’. As the index notes, all four subcategories within the safety and rule of law category show negative trends, with personal safety and national security showing the largest deteriorations at the subcategory level. Moreover, almost half of the countries on the continent recorded their worst ever score in this category within the last three years. The index concludes there is a ‘strong link between Safety & Rule of Law and governance performance’.23
The on-the-ground reality of such statistics can be seen in parts of Cape Town.
The security dimension
Father Craven Engel has the stocky physique of a rugby player. Just like his famous namesake, Doctor Danie Craven, he represented South Africa at scrumhalf.
For 27 years he has worked in the once coloured-only township of Hanover Park, Cape Town, one of the most violent neighbourhoods in the world. The annual murder rate in and around its cinder-block two-storey flats has been as high as 100 deaths per 100 000 residents. Due to high rates of violence in other townships, including Nyanga, Langa, Khayelitsha, Kraaifontein, Delft, Bishop Lavis and Philippi, Cape Town is the most violent city in South Africa as well as Africa.24 In the reporting year from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016, the Philippi East police precinct recorded the highest murder rate in the country at 203.1 per 100 000 residents, followed by Gugulethu at 140.1 per 100 000, and Nyanga at 130.6 per 100 000 people.25 Indeed, at 52 murders per 100 000, eight times higher than the global rate, Cape Town is among the world’s most dangerous cities, in the company of Caracas in Venezuela, San Pedro Sula in Honduras, and San Salvador in El Salvador.
Hanover Park, at just two square kilometres, is formally divided by the police into two sectors. In reality, though, as the Google Earth map displayed in Engel’s conference room illustrates, it is fragmented into several gang-run communities: Cowboy Town, Back Streets, The States, The Taliban Area, The Valley of the Plenty and The Jungle. Each is controlled by a grouping that is essentially an affiliate of two predominant major gangs, the Mongrels (under the ‘British flag’) and the Americans. The Americans have recently spawned another affiliate – labelled ISIS – though the pastor is understandably keen to downplay the religious dimension in an already fraught and volatile environment.
Father Engel runs a programme under the Pentecostal Church, funded by the City of Cape Town, to prevent violence, mediate between gangs and rehabilitate their members. Five ‘interrupters’, all former senior gang members, are employed along with the same number of outreach workers; there are also four data capturers and researchers. The team monitor security events using a system of ‘shot-spotters’, microphones installed on street lights linked to a Google Earth system and cellphones. This technology allows real-time monitoring of shootings, and immediate intervention and mediation. Although they share ‘analytical’ information, the police here are little trusted or used. Indeed, there are claims that the increasingly heavy weapons used here – including 16- and 21-shot Uzis – have found their way into Hanover Park from police armouries.
Father Engel has plenty on his plate, with an average of between 40 and 50 murders a year. During May 2016, for example, 325 gunshots were logged in the township, with five dead and eight wounded from 36 gang-related incidents, about 30 per cent of which were related to drugs and turf wars. The rest of the violence, the pastor notes, is ‘sporadic’ – often tit-for-tat attacks. The day before we visited Ceasefire, Father Engel’s NGO, two gangsters were shot in retributive gunfights, one of them a bodyguard of just 15.
Gangs are a way of life, Father Engel admits, among Hanover Park’s 55 000 people. Unemployment is endemic here, despite the city’s relatively low overall rate of joblessness (21.1 per cent) compared to the South African average of 36.3 per cent. Gang members often leave school early, earning their ‘rank’ in prison – known as the ‘University of Crime’ – in a strict hierarchy defined by ‘generals’, ‘captains’ and ‘shooters’. Violent activities centre on the borders between the ganglands, where there is little movement of people, or where lighting is poor at night.
He says that the proportion of high-risk individuals in Hanover Park is less than 8 per cent of the population. ‘If you can get the violence out of the areas, just like you would use a toilet and sewer to remove waste, then a solution is possible.’ This is not easy, however, in an area where confidence is low, transport to places of work costly and insecurity pervasive. Father Engel has stepped in where the state has failed, stabilising the situation. But, for this to stick, more than a civil-society initiative is required. Sustained policing that deploys available technologies is one aspect, increasing the police-to-population ratio, averaging 439 officers per 100 000 people in Cape Town (with some areas, such as certain townships, well above this figure) towards the international norm of 220 to 100 000.26 There is an overlap between the lack of policing attention and the rates of violence, where just 15 areas of the city, says its mayoral security chief J.P. Smith, account for half the crime.27 Still, more will be needed, says Father Engel, ‘to create alternatives – jobs. If we can create jobs for just 10 per cent of them, then the rest will start dreaming.’ It is not surprising that in those police precincts in the Cape characterised by high murder levels, there are high levels of socio-economic inequality and increasing unemployment.28
Africa is not the only continent that has grappled with such challenges. Seemingly hopeless situations can quickly be turned around, within a generation. The story of Medellín, Colombia, illustrates this promise.
What success looks like
The turnaround of Medellín, the second-largest city in Colombia, has in part been due to better leadership and city planning. But it has also been made possible by a changed security environment in the city once eponymous with the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Medellín once boasted the highest rates of violent crime in the world, reaching nearly 7 000 murders a year at the peak of Pablo Escobar’s reign in the early 1990s. By 2008, the figure was down to little more than 1 000 homicides, falling to 658 by 2014.29 In 1991, to use a different measure, Medellín experienced 381 homicides per 100 000 residents, twice as much as the rate 20 years later in Ciudad Juárez, then the epicentre of Mexico’s drug war. By 2015, Medellín had the same homicide rate as Washington DC.30
The spark for these improvements and the economic growth that followed came 20 years earlier, when Escobar was tracked down and killed by the authorities in a Medellín barrio in December 1993. His end signalled the advent of a new security and intelligence regime, a renewed war on drugs, and a whole-of-government approach to dealing with security and development.31 The election of the government of President Álvaro Uribe in 2002 in particular saw a dramatic turnaround in Colombia’s security situation by providing increased resources to the security services, greater spending on infrastructure and attention to detail by leadership to even the most remote areas of Colombia. This set in motion a process that enabled a truce to be agreed with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known as FARC) by the end of 2016.32
Policing is now controlled from Medellín’s high-tech dispatch centre located in the mayoral offices, where officers monitor feeds on giant television screens. The capabilities of the police have also