18 May 2022
A mobile police station was opened late last year but the permanent police station will not be built until 2025-6. Archive photo: supplied by Nosiphelele Msesiwe
Makhaza residents in Khayelitsha might have to wait another four years for a police station in their area, in spite of promises by Police Minister Bheki Cele.
Residents have been campaigning for a police station for Makhaza for years. A site for the police station was identified back in 2004.
In 2013, the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry Into Policing recommended a new police station for Makhaza.
In April 2021, police spokesperson Andre Traut said the station was “in an advanced planning phase”.
And in his budget speech in Parliament in May 2018, Minister of Police Bheki Cele said Makhaza would get a station by 2022.
A mobile police station was opened in November 2021, just before the municipal elections. But, said the Social Justice Coalition, the station is inside the Makhaza Shopping Centre and is inaccessible after 9pm when the shopping centre is closed.
“This leaves residents from Makhaza and surrounding areas in more or less the same position they were in before the mobile police station was delivered,” said the SJC.
Traut told GroundUp the permanent police station in Makhaza was currently in the “planning and design phase and construction was scheduled for the “2025-2026 financial year.”