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

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.

But this is bigger than Kempton Park.

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.

It shouldn’t. The emergency should have begun with the first woman.

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.

We were promised CCTV cameras. We were promised e-panic buttons. We were told about an integrated command centre. We were told about AmaPanyaza crime wardens, drones, helicopters and technology that would allow government to see, respond and intervene.

So where is it? How do we get to five women dead in the same general area and only now start asking whether these cases could be connected?

Where were the cameras? Were they working? Were they covering Rhodesfield and the R21 corridor? Was anybody watching them? Did anyone see anything suspicious? Did the technology pick up vehicles, movements or people who could now help investigators?

And if Elizabeth was going for a routine afternoon jog in an area where we have been told multimillion-rand crime-fighting infrastructure is operating, how did she disappear and end up dead?

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.

The private sector partnered with government. Money was spent, equipment was bought, systems were installed and politicians stood in front of cameras and told us that Gauteng was getting serious about crime.

Because it feels like Gauteng is pointing at SAPS, SAPS is pointing at policing structures and everyone is looking for somebody else to answer the questions.

Lesufi cannot take political credit for Gauteng’s crime-fighting machinery when it works and then disappear behind the distinction between provincial government and SAPS when we ask why it appears to have failed.

And SAPS cannot tell women to stop running alone and call that a solution.

That is not crime prevention. That is telling women to make themselves smaller because the state has failed to make their communities safer.

I know what it means to move through the world knowing that your safety cannot always be taken for granted, but I also know I cannot speak over women’s lived experience of gender-based violence. What I can do is ask why the people with the power, money, technology and institutions to make communities safer continue to place the responsibility for avoiding violence on the people most at risk of experiencing it.

And this is where civil society’s call to #FundTheFight becomes more than a slogan.

If private companies are putting money into fighting GBVF, if government is spending millions on technology and infrastructure, then implementation matters and so does monitoring, maintenance, policing, procurement, corruption and accountability.

Because you cannot keep asking the private sector to fund the fight while nobody is prepared to properly account for what happens after the money is spent.

What was bought? Where was it deployed? Who was monitoring it? Was it working? Who was responsible for making sure it worked? And what happens when it doesn’t?

These are not unreasonable questions. They are the bare minimum.

And this is exactly why the National Council on GBVF needs teeth. Not another body that produces recommendations and statements while women continue dying. It needs the authority to interrogate government commitments, track money, demand implementation reports and ask very uncomfortable questions when promises made to communities are not delivered.

Because investors and private-sector partners will eventually ask the same questions: why should we fund the fight if nobody is accountable for what happens to that funding?

And ordinary people are entitled to ask an even simpler question: if all this money, technology and political machinery cannot stop us from reaching a point where five women are dead in the same area, then what exactly are we paying for?

It is government that needs to be careful now, because this is a National Disaster, five women are dead in Kempton Park and we are still asking where the hell the promises went.

Oliver Meth is a development & political communications strategist. He is also an anti-GBVF activist