The arrest of senior police officers, lack of political leadership and issues around service delivery have contributed to the killing of women in the City of Ekurhuleni, political parties say.
The bodies of at least nine women have been discovered in the industrial city of Ekurhuleni, prompting a temporary lockdown of the city as police attempt to deal with the crisis.
The City of Ekurhuleni has been accused number one at the Madlanga Commission, where police have been accused of murder, extortion and corruption, with deputy chief of police Julius Mkhwanazi also found to have close ties with underworld figure Vusumuzi "Cat" Matlala.
In 2024, Ekurhuleni serial rapist Nkosinathi Phakathi pleaded guilty to 148 charges and was sentenced to 42 life terms and 791 years for raping and kidnapping women in Crystal Park, Benoni, Daveyton and Putfontein.
Last year, on New Year's Day, the body of a five-year-old girl was discovered in a veld in Duduza after she was allegedly raped and stabbed to death.
In 2022, in Wattville, Bokgabo Poo was only four years old when she was abducted, raped, murdered and her little body mutilated by a man who was on bail for allegedly raping a nine-year-old girl.
Economic Freedom Fighters Gauteng MEC for Finance and former Ekurhuleni MMC for finance Nkululeko Dunga said the leadership crisis in the department of community safety in the city did not, however, create the motive for the killing of women in the city.
Dunga said the ineffectiveness of policing and the lack of leadership, both from a political and administrative perspective, had contributed to what was happening in the city.
He said there were bodies being dumped everywhere, while society had no confidence in the police because those in the dock included police officers who had been charged with the same offences unfolding in the city.
Suspended EMPD deputy chief Julius Mkhwanazi was granted R10 000 bail this week in the latest blue-lights corruption case.
However, he will remain behind bars while he awaits the outcome of a separate bail application linked to the murder of businessman Emmanuel Mbense.
Mkhwanazi and five co-accused, some of whom are police officers, are facing charges of murder, robbery with aggravating circumstances and defeating or obstructing the administration of justice in connection with the 2022 death of Mbense, whose body was allegedly dumped at a dam near Nigel.
"There is criminality amongst the state itself. Blue-light hijackings have been done by police.
"The capture of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate is evident even at the Madlanga Commission," Dunga said.
"It has become a culture where someone can kill a person and not be held to account because the police are under-capacitated, whether financially or in terms of training. There is no accountability and justice in the city."
He said the lack of service delivery had also contributed to the crisis facing the city — in many areas there were neither streetlights nor CCTV cameras and grass was left to grow long. That had created a conducive environment for criminality to thrive.
Dunga said the lack of visibility in the city had also led to a conducive environment for criminality to thrive.
"Those who told us the GNU would give us sober leadership, are the ones under whose leadership we are seeing the things we are seeing in Ekurhuleni."
"The City of Ekurhuleni has been consistent in the killing of women and children. It's actually number one and is the capital city in terms of cold cases which remain unresolved.
"But no one is red-flagging it at a national level because there is also a crisis at national level where the DA is fighting the ANC and the ANC is fighting each other. It's a mess."
Democratic Alliance Ekurhuleni mayoral candidate Khathu Rasilingwana said criminals operating in the city saw the dysfunction, the lack of leadership in the municipality and the collapse in service delivery, which resulted in them being able to wreak havoc in municipalities.
Rasilingwana said streetlights in the city were not functioning and, for the longest time, the city had a chief of police who was suspended for two years.
She said almost 300 Ekurhuleni Metro Police Department vehicles were stuck in workshops, which translated into a lack of visibility in communities.
"You had Julius Mkhwanazi arrested literally every Friday. They also know that EMPD does not have vehicles."
Rasilingwana said that when there was weak leadership in the municipality, other symptoms were bound to follow naturally because criminals knew there was no one who would be able to hold them accountable.
Speaking to the Mail & Guardian podcast on Wednesday, ANC treasurer-general Gwen Ramokgopa said the women killed in Ekurhuleni were not just numbers.
"These are human beings, somebody's daughter, somebody's mother, somebody's aunt and it's just a chill down the spine as you hear another body has been found."
Ramokgopa said that on Tuesday she had a discussion with the secretary-general of the ANC Women's League, the MEC for social development in Gauteng and a few ministers to request that they join efforts to find a solution to the matter, as the country could not continue on this path.
"I must commend the minister of police and the team. They have assured us that they will not sleep until they have cracked the case and we are convinced that they are not taking this matter lightly," she said.
"We certainly need to get to the bottom of this. We need to take this pain out of our nation. It can't be that we have a democracy that can assure safety and security for women. It is a burden that we are carrying, and all of us must focus."
She said she did not believe that men were not pained by the killing of women but believed men should also come to the party to try to help resolve the matter, adding that she was aware that men, led by the president, had also stood up to say: "Not in our name."
"Through the pain that we feel, let's join hands, let's get to the bottom of this, let's have consequences, let's put preventative measures and let's make sure that South Africa is safe for a girl as it is for a boy, for women as it is for men."
"We used to say GBV, but we had to put 'F' for 'femicide' because we had to acknowledge that the damage is deeper than just the violence.
"Our women are being killed and it can't be the democracy that many of us fought for and were prepared to die for, so that the Constitution accords men and women their rights."
Ramokgopa added that she also believed the high levels of crime and use of drugs were probably contributing factors, saying the country needed to deal with those underlying factors.
"I think we need to get sociologists, psychologists to also come to the party to get the perpetrators understood, to say what really drives them to this. There are too many men who continue to perpetrate violence against women.
"Some know that these women will talk and they will get justice; they then kill. We need to be able to say any measure of abuse is one measure too many, so that we are able to build a generation where there is mutual respect and have communities which are having their human rights respected."