Uproar over Cape Town's plan to build an anti-crime wall on airport highway

Cape Town's plans to build a wall to prevent crime along on a highway used to travel between the airport and the city centre has divided residents in South Africa's tourist hotspot.

The nearly nine-kilometre structure will separate part of the road along a stretch that is lined by poor townships.

Attacks, some deadly, have been reported for years along the busy multi-lane route, including hijackings and smash-and-grab incidents during slow-moving traffic.

"They'll come with a stone and break the windscreen," said e-hailing driver Mustafa Hashim, recounting stories of incidents on the corridor.

"If you want to keep your life, then you just leave them to take whatever they want," he added.

The city announced the nearly $7 million N2 Edge safety project in December, soon after a woman was fatally stabbed at a traffic light just off the highway.

A key feature is a three-metre "safety barrier" to reinforce a broken concrete palisade fence and keep the road clear of potential criminals, as well as pedestrians and animals.

While the city has deployed additional law enforcement along the route, the perception among locals is that crime has increased.

"Literally hundreds of thousands of people a day use that road, and many of them feel unsafe," said Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, stressing that most were local commuters.

But the project has been met with fierce criticism from several sectors of society. Some accuse the metro of trying to hide the inequality from tourists travelling into the city.

Others warn it will be ineffective, saying the root causes need to be addressed and that it will just shift crime elsewhere, while some see it as a continuation of apartheid-era spatial separation.

Residents of the Nyanga informal settlement that will be behind the wall say they are victims of the same crimes reported on the road and that it will not help them.

"This wall will assist the motorists, but for us, the perpetrators will be with us," said Linda Monakali, adding that the attackers will just disappear into the maze of shacks.

Between October and December 2025, the Nyanga Police Station reported the highest number of robberies with aggravating circumstances in the country, according to police statistics.

It was also listed as the second highest for murders, seeing a 29 per cent increase compared to the previous quarter.

The chairman of the Nyanga Community Policing Forum chairman, Dumisani Qwebe, said the city should rather look at improving living conditions in the area.

This included 24-hour surveillance cameras and decent sanitation, with women particularly at risk of sexual violence when they use outside toilets at night.

Anger over the wall dominated the recent Cape Town Pride mardi gras with activists carrying banners reading "Homes not walls".

Cape Town's high crime and murder rate is concentrated in its poorer areas -- another world from the upmarket areas, beaches, and mountains that attract millions of tourists.

President Cyril Ramaphosa recently announced that the army will be deployed to parts of the city gripped by bloody gang wars.