Nelson Mandela Bay ‘imbizo’ targets longstanding gang shooting crisis

Two months ago local churches and the municipality in Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB) united to conduct a three-day campaign of prayer and fasting called One People, One Vision, Heal Our Bay.

Currently One People, One Vision, Heal Our Bay – a movement that has grown out of the campaign – is one of the key roleplayers in a multi-stakeholder local initiative to tackle a scourge of gang-related murders and shootings that has been claiming young lives in the Northern Areas of the metro for decades.

Gateway News spoke to Pastor Timothy Hendricks, one of the leaders in the initiative, who participated in a community policing imbizo called “Enough is Enough” last Thursday, at Hillside High School which is close to some of the Northern Areas gang-shooting hotspots. He said the imbizo, which was attended by many local residents as well as various government, municipal and civil society representatives, went exceptionally well”.

The heart of the two-hour meeting was to gather information from local residents. And this will also be the focus of two further imbizos on November 7 and 15, in other areas of the Northern Areas, he said.

Pastor Timothy said SAPS and the NPA were not able to make last week’s imbizo but are on board going ahead. The meeting did “receive the blessing of the District Police Board,” he said.

He commended the chairman of last Thursday’s imbizo, Christian Martin a rep to the Human rights Commission, Farouk Jephta an NGO representative , Donovan May deputy president of Cricket SA and Monty Uren chairperson of the NMB District Business Community Police Board, who he said did well to keep the tone of the meeting “apolitical and constructive”. 

“God intervened in His own way: this Imbizo did not belong to any individual but to the best interest of the community,” he said. The community felt open and easy to express themselves about the challenges in the community and tabled many practical solutions to a community under satanic siege.”

He continued: “So there’s lots of information from the community that we’re now processing. So, it’s going to be back to the drawing board to plan. You know, we are tired of the SAPS planning for us. They need to plan with us.

“And the Church has a major role to plan in this process because these people are the congregants.” 

But he noted that it will be essential for the Church to go to the community rather than to wait for the community to come to church.

“The sad thing is that Helenvale [a major gang shooting hotspot] is just 4 sq km. It has 190 churches and I don’t know how many pastors there are in the area. So, I must say that sometimes we are at odds with ourselves but I think we are on the right track now. Clearly the Church needs to get out of its walls because inviting the people to the Church is totally different from going out and taking the Church to the people.

“So we have appealed, let the Church go to the schools, let the Church go to the community. It comes out of the information because we’ve lost our moral compass as communities. It is children controlling parents, instead of parents controlling the children.”

“Because children are searching for role models such as men and women that are standing as our school teachers, nurses,medical practitioners, advocates, magistrates, judges, pilots, firefighters, police officers and much, much more, instead of focusing on short term no-good drug dealers offering our kids the bling bling.

“This short term offer comes with low education or no education, with no need for a CV but a price to pay long term prison sentences a language owned by prisoners only known by themselves. It comes also with community rejection and a host of other negative factors that demoralise the community at large.”

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