Ramaphosa’s safety drive exposes how normalised danger has become in South Africa

South Africa has a habit of making statistics sound abstract until they turn up as bodies. The discovery of 12 women dead in an area east of Johannesburg over two months has done exactly that, forcing President Cyril Ramaphosa to announce a national emergency response and a clean-up of high-risk areas. Four arrests have been made, but the political damage is already done: this is now a test of whether the state can do more than react after the fact.

Ramaphosa said gender-based violence cannot be treated as a normal part of life in South Africa, and he admitted the government has not done enough to protect women and girls. He also addressed the fear that the killings might be linked to one perpetrator, saying there had been widespread concern about that possibility, but that police have not found evidence to support it. For investigators, that distinction matters. For the public, the larger question is why so many women remain exposed in the first place.

The president’s answer was a package of measures that sounds practical because, frankly, it should have been standard years ago. Every municipality must begin a women’s safety audit without delay, with high-risk areas identified and dealt with. The list of hazards is depressingly ordinary: broken streetlights, overgrown public spaces, abandoned buildings, unsafe transport routes, poorly secured parks and other conditions that make women more vulnerable.

He also announced an enforcement package aimed at alcohol-related violence. Alcohol, Ramaphosa said, does not cause gender-based violence and can never excuse it; responsibility always lies with the perpetrator. Harmful alcohol use, however, is a significant aggravating factor in interpersonal violence and must be tackled as part of wider prevention efforts. That is a sober distinction, and one that probably ought not to require a national crisis to be stated aloud.

The deeper part of his address went beyond policing and legislation. Ramaphosa argued that violence against women begins much earlier, in attitudes that see women as inferior and in the belief that a man has the right to control a woman. It begins, he said, when jealousy is mistaken for love, control for protection and coercion for affection; it begins when a man refuses to accept no. He called on men and boys to take the lead in ending gender-based violence, adding that the burden of male violence has been placed on women for too long.

The backdrop is bleak enough without any editorial embellishment. South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates, with 5,427 people murdered between April and June this year alone. Police statistics do not separate victims by gender, but the South African Human Rights Commission recently said 569 women were killed and 1,052 others survived attempted murder in that same period. Against figures like those, a safety audit is not a grand solution. It is an overdue admission that too much was left to decay, and that the cost has been paid by women first.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com