Walls will not save us: Jay Naidoo

Key topics:Cape Town proposes a R114m security wall on the N2 corridor.Critics call it divisive, echoing apartheid-era spatial logic.Debate centres on walls vs. investment in communities..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Jay Naidoo.The DA-led City of Cape Town council is proposing a security wall costing more than R114 million along a nine-kilometre stretch of the N2 highway as part of what it calls the N2 Edge Safety Project.Officials, including Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, argue the barrier is necessary for safety and to renew deteriorating infrastructure along a corridor long associated with violent attacks on motorists.Opposition councillors from the ANC and the GOOD Party have sharply criticised the project, calling it apartheid-style spatial reinforcement and a symbol of misplaced priorities that does not address the root causes of crime and inequality.That is the factual landscape.Now let us examine the moral one.I was four years old when my family was evicted from our home.Not because we had failed.Not because we were criminals.But because apartheid had already decided that where we lived was not meant for us.I grew up under apartheid that was enforced through coercion and mass eviction and land dispossession of millions of black peoples that still lives on today. It did not always need concrete walls. It used laws, passbooks, buffer zones and forced removals. But the principle was the same: security for the affluent, exclusion for the poor. .Read more:.Joburg mayoral crisis sparks debate over COGTA’s proposed coalition bill.When I hear the language of walls in South Africa, even when framed as safety, history speaks.Let us be clear. Crime is real. Violence is real. Fear is real. Motorists deserve protection. Communities deserve security. No responsible leader can dismiss that.But in a society shaped by engineered spatial inequality, infrastructure decisions are never merely technical.The proposed wall runs adjacent to communities such as Khayelitsha and Gugulethu, areas born from apartheid’s forced removals and land dispossession. The N2 is not simply a highway. It is a line that traces the geography of inequality, wealth on one side of the city, poverty on the other.When we choose concrete as our response, we must ask what message it sends? If we are prepared to spend well over one hundred million rand on a wall, what would happen if that same investment were directed into the communities alongside that corridor?What if we invested in youth employment programmes, local enterprise support, street lighting, safe pedestrian crossings, neighbourhood safety partnerships, sports facilities and public infrastructure that restores dignity?The majority of people living in these townships are not criminals. They are hardworking South Africans navigating unemployment, overcrowding and economic exclusion. They wake before dawn. They commute long distances. They raise children with hope in conditions not of their making.When we build barriers that visually and physically harden the divide between economic centres and impoverished communities, we risk reinforcing a dangerous narrative.It says proximity is a threat especially if people are of colour or poor. This is racism unfettered. It says containment is policy imperative It says separation is safety for the few but a prison for the rest. That is a familiar logic.South Africa’s spatial injustice did not happen by accident. The 1913 Land Act confined African people to a fraction of the land. Apartheid entrenched townships far from opportunity. Highways became dividing lines. Democracy dismantled the laws, but the geography remains stubborn.Cape Town today is praised as a global city, yet it remains one of the most unequal urban landscapes in the world.Walls may offer the illusion of order. They do not create cohesion.Crime does not disappear because it meets a barrier. It shifts. It adapts. It reappears elsewhere.Durable safety is relational, not architectural.When young people see credible pathways to employment, crime declines. When communities trust law enforcement, intelligence improves. When public investment reflects respect, civic pride strengthens.Security imposed from above breeds resentment. Security co-created with communities builds resilience.This moment also forces broader reflection.Thirty-one years into democracy, we face a crisis of political imagination. The implosion of the ANC through factionalism and corruption has hollowed out much of the liberation movement’s moral authority. Liberal governance at local level often substitutes managerial efficiency for structural transformation. Across the political spectrum, there is too little courage to dismantle spatial inequality at its root.Raising political temperature through xenophobic rhetoric will not deliver transformation. Nor will technocratic responses that manage symptoms while leaving structural injustice intact.The deeper question is not whether a wall can slow crime on one stretch of road.The deeper question is whether we are willing to redesign our cities around integration rather than insulation? South Africa was meant to choose a different path. Our democracy was not only about changing who governs. It was about transforming how we live together.We cannot claim to have left apartheid behind if our reflex in moments of anxiety is to fortify boundaries between rich and poor.The real courage now is not to pour concrete.It is to sit down.Sit with residents of Khayelitsha and Gugulethu.Sit with youth leaders.Sit with community safety forums.Sit with local entrepreneurs.Co-design solutions that strengthen safety and opportunity simultaneously.If we can mobilise millions for a wall, surely we can mobilise millions for shared prosperity.This is not about denying security concerns. It is about reframing them.The question is not how we shield the affluent from the poor.The question is how we strengthen the overwhelming majority of decent, law-abiding South Africans who want stability, dignity and a future for their children..Read more:.Proposed gun reforms put citizens and security at risk: Gideon Joubert.The measure of a society is not how effectively it hides its inequality.It is how courageously it confronts it.Walls may quiet anxiety for a moment.Justice builds peace.And peace built on justice does not require fortification.Let us build bridges where history-built barriers.Let us invest in people.The majority of South Africans are sick and tired of crime and corruption. And we grow exhausted by the political party rhetoric in our country that brings no lasting solutions or authentic transformation.

Walls will not save us: Jay Naidoo

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