South African soldiers deploy in Johannesburg to tackle crime and gangs | Crime news

The first troops landed nearly a month after President Ramaphosa said organized crime threatened the country’s democracy.

Soldiers have been deployed on the streets of South Africa’s largest city, nearly a month after the president announced that the military would work with the police to tackle high-level crime.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said in his annual State of the Nation address on February 12 that organized crime was the “most immediate threat” to South Africa’s democracy and economic development.

On Wednesday, the troops touched down on the streets of Eldorado Park, a working-class suburb of the country’s financial capital, Johannesburg, which has high levels of crime and gang violence.

Local media published images of armored vehicles rolling into the area and local councilor Juwairia Kaldin welcomed their arrival, Independent Online reported.

Soldiers were also seen in the Johannesburg suburb of Riverlea. Media reports said that soldiers are conducting house-to-house searches.

South Africa’s National Police Service and the Department of Defense, which oversees the military, did not immediately provide details of the deployment. But the president said last month that the army would help the police service fight gang violence and illegal mining.

Ramaphosa said in a notice to the Speaker of Parliament that 550 soldiers will be involved in the initial deployment in Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg, to combat crime and maintain law and order.

That assignment will last until the end of April, he said.

According to details submitted by the police to Parliament, the government has planned widespread deployment in five of its nine provinces.

The assignment focuses on illegal mining in Gauteng, North West and Free State provinces and gang violence in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces.

Parts of the national deployment could last more than a year, police officials said.

South Africa has a high rate of violent crime. Police reported 6,351 murders from October to December 2025, an average of 70 per day in a country of about 63 million people.

However, not all residents of crime-prone communities are happy about the plan to deploy troops.

In the Cape Flats, an impoverished area of ​​the Western Cape with high levels of gang violence, troops are also likely to be deployed, people told Al Jazeera last month that would not help fix the root causes of the violence or the social ills that make it easier for people to join gangs.

“It’s a very dangerous thing to bring in the military because there is impatience that the police are not doing their job,” Irwin Kinnes, an assistant professor at the University of Cape Town’s Center for Criminology, told Al Jazeera at the time, calling the move “political”.

“To show that the political leaders have listened to the public. But the call for the army did not come from the community. It came from the politicians,” he said.