Nine Dead Women and a State That Cannot Protect Us

Nine women are dead, and South Africa’s police are once again promising action after the bodies have already piled up. The deeper scandal is the state that failed to protect them.

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

Written By: Daniel Mercer

As of writing, shortly after 9am on 17 September 2026, South African police are investigating the deaths of nine women whose bodies have been discovered across Ekurhuleni since July.

The ninth was discovered on Thursday morning in the Dawn Park area, in Villa Liza township. Police said she was partially naked, consistent with the condition in which several of the other women were found, and preliminary information suggested that her body had been dumped there. Police have still not established that all nine deaths are connected.

Three of the women have now been publicly identified: Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, 38, Itumeleng Kekana, 32, and Dineo Evelyn Motapane, 38. Moselakgomo disappeared after leaving home for her usual run on 9 September. Her body was found three days later behind a hotel in Rhodesfield. Motapane was found on the side of a road in KwaThema on 15 September and was identified by her family the following day.

The discoveries have understandably terrified women living around Kempton Park and the broader East Rand.

Police have not established whether South Africa is dealing with a serial murderer, several killers, copycats, or a number of unrelated murders that share disturbing characteristics. They have explicitly cautioned against drawing that conclusion prematurely. One suspect is already in custody in connection with the first July case, while investigators have also been pursuing another person of interest. The arrest has not established a link between that first killing and the others.

That distinction matters. Sensationalism will not bring these women justice.

What has changed is the scale of the police response.

A multidisciplinary team involving experienced detectives, forensic specialists, Crime Intelligence and the Investigative Psychology Unit is investigating the cases. Police have offered a R400,000 reward for information leading to arrests, while Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia has promised substantially increased police visibility through Operation Shanela in Kempton Park and surrounding areas.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has directed that the cases be prioritised and promised that “no stone will be left unturned” in bringing those responsible to justice. His statement acknowledged the fear and uncertainty the killings have created, particularly among women.

South Africans have heard versions of that promise before.

Usually after enough bodies have accumulated to transform ordinary government failure into a national scandal.

The more important question is why the state so often begins turning over stones only after people are dead.

Whoever murdered these women bears responsibility for their deaths. If one man killed them, arrest and prosecute that man. If several people killed them, arrest and prosecute each of them. Criminal guilt belongs to criminals.

But there is another form of responsibility that should not disappear beneath the understandable outrage surrounding violence against women.

The state is responsible for maintaining institutions capable of finding murderers, dismantling criminal networks and creating a credible expectation that violent offenders will be caught.

On that front, South Africa’s political leadership has decades of uncomfortable questions to answer.

And many of those questions concern decisions made under successive ANC governments.

This is not an argument for minimising South Africa’s crisis of violence against women. The government itself classified gender-based violence and femicide as a national disaster in November 2025. Women face particular dangers from intimate partners, sexual predators and violent men.

But recognising patterns of victimisation is different from assigning collective guilt.

Statistics describe patterns. They do not transfer moral culpability between people who happen to share a sex.

A murderer is guilty because he murders somebody. A rapist is guilty because he rapes somebody. A man who has done neither does not acquire a portion of that guilt because another man committed the crime.

There is also a danger in allowing the institutional question to disappear into an exclusively cultural discussion about men and masculinity.

Millions of ordinary South African men have no control over SAPS detective capacity, forensic laboratories, Crime Intelligence or the appointment of senior police officials.

Government does.

And South Africa’s violent-crime problem extends far beyond any single category of victim.

The latest national crime statistics recorded 5,427 murders between April and June 2026, almost 60 killings a day. That represented a 5.9% decline from the same quarter in 2025, which is welcome, but it still meant more than five thousand people were killed in only three months. Gauteng alone recorded 1,276 murders.

Earlier sex-disaggregated SAPS data provide another important piece of context. Between January and March 2025, 5,727 people were murdered, of whom 4,890 were male and 837 female. Roughly 85% of murder victims during that period were men.

This does not diminish violence against women.

It demonstrates something larger.

South Africa has a violence problem.

It has a criminality problem.

And, for the purposes of political accountability, it has a state-capacity problem.

Libertarians disagree with much of what modern governments do. We can argue about welfare, healthcare, industrial policy, education, employment schemes and a thousand other interventions.

But there are some functions of the state that are much harder to dispute.

Protecting people from predation is one of them.

I can buy private healthcare. I can insure my property. I can pay for private security. I can educate my children privately.

What I cannot legally establish is my own competing murder investigation bureau, prosecuting authority, criminal court and prison system.

The state claims those functions for itself.

Having claimed them, it acquires an obligation to perform them competently.

South Africans increasingly pay twice for safety: once through taxation for SAPS, and then again through armed response, private security, tracking companies, neighbourhood watches and every other private substitute we have constructed around an unreliable state.

But even the best private security company cannot replace a functioning detective service.

And this is where the Ekurhuleni killings intersect with a much older political story.

The democratic government did not inherit a simple or healthy policing system in 1994. It had to amalgamate the South African Police and the policing agencies of the former homelands into a new national service, while simultaneously transforming an institution designed under apartheid. Reform was unavoidable.

But transformation and effective criminal investigation were never mutually exclusive.

The weakening of specialised investigative capacity happened in stages.

The SAPS Investigative Psychology Unit, created in the 1990s to assist with serial murder, serial rape and other psychologically motivated crimes, depended heavily on the ability to assemble teams of experienced detectives. Research published by the Institute for Security Studies found that SAPS restructuring disrupted the unit’s ability to rapidly mobilise trained investigators from Serious and Violent Crime and Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences structures as specialist personnel were redistributed.

There was a managerial theory behind decentralisation.

Station detectives were overloaded. Police wanted expertise closer to communities. Greater capacity at station level was a legitimate goal.

But expertise is not infinitely divisible.

A skilled murder detective does not become skilled because a human-resources document designates him a detective. He becomes skilled through years of investigation, repeated exposure to difficult cases and, crucially, through working alongside investigators who know more than he does.

Institutional knowledge resides in people.

It resides in the detective who has spent twenty years learning how offenders behave. It resides in the investigator who recognises which apparently insignificant crime-scene detail matters. It resides in relationships between detectives, forensic personnel, prosecutors and informants.

Destroying that knowledge does not produce a dramatic photograph.

There is no collapsed bridge or burned-out substation.

The detective simply retires, resigns or is transferred. The younger investigator who might have learnt from him never does. The expertise disappears quietly.

The process intensified after Jackie Selebi became National Police Commissioner in January 2000.

Selebi came to the job from diplomacy and senior government rather than professional policing. The Institute for Security Studies has subsequently identified the politicisation and instability of senior SAPS leadership, including Selebi’s appointment, as part of a deeper leadership problem inside the service.

Under the restructuring associated with his tenure, approximately 7,000 detectives previously based in 503 specialised units were redeployed to station level. Contemporary ISS research warned of excessive caseloads, inadequate training, uncertain career paths, inappropriate promotion systems and a skills drain as experienced detectives left the service.

Between 2000 and 2006, numerous specialised investigative structures were closed, consolidated or decentralised.

The Serious and Violent Crime units were dissolved and their personnel distributed to high-crime stations. FCS capacity was redistributed. Long-standing structures dealing with narcotics and internal corruption were among those closed or absorbed into broader structures.

The theory was that policing would become more effective by bringing resources closer to ordinary stations.

But specialised teams do more than concentrate manpower.

They reproduce expertise.

As former senior SAPS officer and ISS researcher Johan Burger later explained, younger investigators in specialised units learn from experienced detectives. Once those teams are dispersed, the organisation loses not only existing expertise but its mechanism for producing the next generation of experts.

The government eventually conceded that at least part of the experiment had gone wrong.

Discussing the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences units, then deputy police minister Maggie Sotyu said:

“We naively closed our specialized units.”

The FCS units were subsequently re-established nationally from 2010.

Consider what that means in the context of the present crisis.

The state is again mobilising the Investigative Psychology Unit, specialised murder detectives, forensic experts and Crime Intelligence to determine whether the deaths of these women are linked.

That is exactly the sort of specialised capacity serious and unusual crimes require.

The lesson should be obvious. General policing and specialised policing are not substitutes for one another. A country needs both.

Then the story becomes darker.

Jackie Selebi was not merely a police commissioner whose restructuring decisions remain controversial.

South Africa’s National Police Commissioner was himself convicted of corruption.

The Supreme Court of Appeal upheld Selebi’s conviction and 15-year sentence. His conviction arose from payments and benefits received from Glenn Agliotti, with the courts finding that Selebi provided assistance in return.

The symbolism remains extraordinary.

A national police commissioner without a policing background presided over the restructuring of specialist investigative capacity and was then convicted of corruption arising from his relationship with a criminal figure.

And Selebi was not the end of the institutional problem.

Under Jacob Zuma, political interference in criminal-justice institutions became one of the mechanisms associated with state capture.

State capture is often remembered through Eskom, Transnet, Gupta-linked contracts and procurement scandals.

But corruption on that scale also depends on the institutions responsible for investigation and prosecution.

A joint submission by the Institute for Security Studies and Corruption Watch to the Zondo Commission documented political manipulation involving SAPS, Crime Intelligence, the Hawks, the National Prosecuting Authority and IPID. The submission argued that interference with criminal-justice agencies contributed to the impunity that allowed state capture to become entrenched.

That history matters because institutional corruption rarely remains neatly contained within political corruption.

Once appointments depend on patronage, inconvenient investigations carry career risks, intelligence structures become factional battlegrounds and competence becomes secondary to political loyalty, the consequences can spread far beyond cases involving politicians.

The wall between political capture and criminal capture is thinner than South Africans would like to believe.

The Madlanga Commission exists because allegations of that criminal infiltration have become serious enough to demand a judicial inquiry.

Its terms of reference expressly include allegations that criminal syndicates infiltrated or exerted undue influence over SAPS, Crime Intelligence, metropolitan police departments, the NPA, the State Security Agency and other parts of the criminal-justice system. It is also empowered to investigate the suppression or manipulation of investigations and the involvement of senior officials.

The process is no longer at its beginning.

The Commission submitted its first interim report in December 2025 and its second interim report on 29 May 2026. In August, President Ramaphosa said the second report confirmed, with one exception, recommendations arising from prima facie evidence in the first report after implicated parties had been heard. The final report is currently due on 16 November 2026.

Specific allegations against individuals must still be dealt with according to evidence and due process.

But the broader institutional danger is no longer something government itself denies.

In February, Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia stated that the Madlanga Commission and parliamentary inquiries had shown that “organised criminality has infiltrated our criminal justice system.”

Read that again.

The minister responsible for policing acknowledges that organised criminality has infiltrated institutions responsible for combating organised criminality.

That is the institutional context in which nine women’s bodies are now part of a widening investigation across Ekurhuleni.

It does not mean corrupt police officers killed these women.

It does not prove that a better police service would necessarily have prevented any particular murder.

And it certainly does not prove that all nine women were killed by one person.

Those would be conclusions without evidence.

The point is institutional.

A criminal-justice system does not need to collapse entirely to fail.

Police stations remain open. Blue-light vehicles still drive around. Ministers hold press conferences. Task teams receive impressive names. Arrests still happen.

Institutional failure is visible in probabilities.

What are the chances that a murderer is identified?

What are the chances that forensic evidence is processed efficiently?

What are the chances that a detective has enough experience, time and resources to build a prosecutable case?

What are the chances that a repeat violent offender is imprisoned before producing another victim?

For murder, the figures remain appalling.

In 2023/24, SAPS recorded a murder detection rate of 11.33%.

In 2024/25, that fell to 10.13%.

Detection is not the same thing as conviction. SAPS uses the detection rate to measure cases in which investigation has produced an identified accused and moved the case forward. The conviction rate reported for murder cases that actually reached that stage was much higher, at 80.73% in 2024/25.

The problem is how few murder cases make it that far.

That should terrify South Africans more than any ministerial speech can reassure them.

Criminal deterrence depends partly on the expectation of consequence.

A violent offender who believes the police are likely to identify him faces a different calculation from one who believes the odds overwhelmingly favour getting away with it.

This is why the political response to Ekurhuleni cannot end with warnings that women should avoid running or walking alone.

Precautions may be sensible while an immediate threat remains unresolved. Police have a duty to warn the public about identifiable risks.

But personal caution is not a substitute for public safety.

Women should be able to go running.

They should be able to walk through their neighbourhoods, go to work, visit friends and live ordinary lives without planning every movement around the possibility that a predator may encounter them.

Men should be able to do the same.

A country in which thousands of men are murdered every year and women face horrifying levels of rape, domestic abuse and murder does not need an ideological competition over which sex is permitted to feel unsafe.

It needs criminals caught.

It needs competent detectives.

It needs functioning forensic services.

It needs prosecutors capable of taking good cases to court.

It needs Crime Intelligence focused on criminal networks.

It needs specialist units capable of retaining and transmitting expertise.

And it needs institutions insulated from political and criminal interference.

SAPS is not some naturally occurring feature of the South African landscape.

Its present condition is the product of policy, appointments, restructuring, budgets, leadership decisions and institutional choices made across decades.

For most of the democratic era, those decisions were made under ANC-led governments.

ANC presidents appointed national commissioners. ANC governments oversaw the restructuring and decentralisation of specialised investigative units. The same governments later rebuilt some of those capabilities after acknowledging mistakes. Criminal-justice agencies were subsequently damaged by political interference during the state-capture period, while the current government is now investigating allegations that organised criminal networks penetrated parts of those same institutions.

None of that makes the ANC criminally responsible for these nine deaths.

Political responsibility is not criminal responsibility.

The distinction matters.

If one person murdered these women, prosecute that person.

If several people murdered them, prosecute every one of them.

If police officials protected criminals, investigate those officials.

If politicians interfered with investigations, establish the evidence and hold the responsible individuals accountable under the law.

And when evaluating three decades of policing policy, South Africans should also ask whether decisions concerning leadership, specialisation, investigative capacity and institutional independence made the country better or worse at catching murderers.

What we should not do is replace individual criminal guilt with collective demographic guilt while allowing questions about institutional performance to disappear into another national argument about what is wrong with society.

South Africa does not suffer from too little condemnation of murder.

It suffers from a criminal-justice system that, according to SAPS’s own figures, detected barely one in ten murders in 2024/25.

Nine women are now at the centre of an investigation in Ekurhuleni.

Police may yet establish that some of these deaths are unrelated. They may establish that several perpetrators were responsible. They may establish that one offender committed multiple murders.

That evidence must determine the answer.

But whatever investigators eventually discover, the wider question will remain.

A state that monopolises criminal investigation and prosecution must be capable of making murderers fear being caught.

In South Africa, far too often, they have little reason to.

Daniel Mercer is a South African writer and commentator interested in policing, criminal justice, individual liberty and the institutional failures of the state. He writes from a classical liberal perspective, with a particular focus on political accountability and the protection of individual rights.