Flooded with Filth: How Gang Extortion is Paralyzing Cape Town’s Basic Services

In parts of Cape Town, the most pressing municipal issue isn’t a budget shortfall or an equipment failure. It’s a shakedown. Gangsters are reportedly demanding payments of up to R10,000 from city workers simply for permission to enter neighbourhoods and fix burst sewage pipes and overflowing manholes.

The result is a stomach-churning stalemate. The City of Cape Town, rightfully refusing to pay protection money, cannot guarantee the safety of its staff. And trapped in the middle, in neighbourhoods like Makhaza in Khayelitsha, residents are left to wade through rivers of raw sewage, their lives put on hold by a crisis of crime and infrastructure.

The “Red Zones” Where Help Cannot Go

“For the headache to go away, the areas need to be safe enough for my team to go in,” says Dr. Zahid Badroodien, the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Water and Sanitation. He speaks of officially designated “red zones”areas so dangerous that municipal officials avoid them entirely. “Our staff cannot carry out essential repairs in these areas without putting their lives at risk.”

The human cost is visceral. Residents describe a stench so potent they keep windows shut in summer heat, losing their appetites and watching children play in unsafe, polluted streets. “We’re just left to live in this filth because no one can come in to help,” says Aphiwe Mhlungu, 45, from Makhaza.

A Multilayered Crisis: Extortion, Sabotage, and Politics

The extortion is not an isolated horror. It exists within a vicious cycle of sabotage and political tension. Badroodien details widespread vandalism: standpipes damaged for water, toilet doors stolen for homes, and sewer lines deliberately clogged with debris from construction rubble to car bumpers.

He also points to a grim political pattern, predicting that “as we move closer to the next elections, those same bulk sewer pipelines will start overflowing again,” implying deliberate sabotage to manufacture service delivery crises.

Compounding the issue is the complex challenge of informal settlements built directly on top of critical infrastructure, like the collapsed three-metre sewer servitude in Makhaza. Relocation efforts are themselves hampered, with officials facing threats from community affiliates, including taxi associations.

A System Overwhelmed

The gang extortion economy is well-documented. A report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime identifies it as the “largest income stream after drugs” in the Western Cape, ruthlessly enforced by groups like the 28s and 27s through local proxies.

Facing this organised crime is a severely under-resourced police force. Benedicta van Minnen, a provincial legislature chairperson, notes the province is 8,000 officers short, with conviction rates for gun crimes at a dismal 5%. This lack of enforcement creates a permissive environment for the shakedowns that paralyze municipal repair work.

The city’s response involves deploying its own law enforcement to escort repair teams, but this leads to delays and often, when security support is exhausted, work must stop entirely, prolonging the community’s suffering.

This is more than a service delivery failure; it is the collapse of the social contract in microcosm. Communities are poisoned by their own waste, not because the city lacks the technical skill or the pipes, but because criminal enterprise has made the simple act of fixing a leak a potentially deadly mission. Until the grip of gangsterism is broken, for thousands of Capetonians, the basic dignity of a clean environment will remain just a pipe dream.