OLIVER METH | 5 women dead in Kempton Park: Lesufi, where is the crime-fighting tech we were promised?

Women are not safe. Not in their homes, not at places of worship, not at the post office and, apparently, not even on a f*cking jog.

Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo is dead . The 38-year-old woman who left her Kempton Park home for an afternoon run and never came back has now been positively identified by her family as the woman whose badly beaten body was found in Rhodesfield. Her 8-year-old daughter was the one who raised the alarm when her mother did not return.

Five women found dead in the Kempton Park area in less than two months, with police investigating whether there could be a connection between the cases.

Women are being killed across South Africa with devastating brutality and somehow we continue to behave as though urgency only begins when a case becomes a national headline or goes viral on social media.

SAPS’s own 2023/24 crime statistics recorded 5,578 women murdered in South Africa — roughly 15 women every single day — a 33.8% increase in one year. And since then, we have not even had newer annual SAPS figures giving us a clear national picture of how many women and children are being murdered.

Those numbers should have changed everything about how seriously we respond to GBVF.

Instead, women are still being told to be vigilant. Don’t walk alone. Don’t run alone. Don’t go to isolated places. Move in groups. Stay indoors.

Ten months ago, gender-based violence and femicide was classified as a National Disaster by President Cyril Ramaphosa. So where is the urgency that is supposed to come with that declaration?

Because when five women are dead in one area and the response is still essentially telling women to change their behaviour, something is very wrong.

Why must women now restrict their lives because the state cannot keep dangerous people from killing them?

I am angry about this because we have heard this story over and over again. Watch your surroundings. Don’t walk home alone. Share your location. Carry pepper spray. Do self-defence classes. Stay indoors. Move in groups.

At what point do we stop asking women how they can better avoid becoming victims and start asking government why the hell its crime-prevention systems are not preventing crime?

Because Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi has spent years telling us about those systems.

Technology will not prevent every murder. I understand that. CCTV cameras are not magic and neither are panic buttons. But then don’t sell them to us as part of a sophisticated crime-prevention strategy and expect us to clap when the ribbon is cut, only to tell women to stay home when things go horribly wrong.