Madlanga Commission hears policing evidence as nine women's bodies found in Ekurhuleni

Nine bodies of women have been found in Ekurhuleni since July 2026, and the discoveries have landed at the same moment the Madlanga Commission marks a year of public hearings into the police service.

Corruption Watch executive director Lebogang Ramafoko put the two facts in the same frame in an interview with eNCA. She said the inquiry itself has done its work well, and that the policing system it is examining has not.

“The commission, in my eyes, gets a 10 out of 10, but policing in South Africa gets a minus five out of 10,” she said. “If you match what is happening in policing with the discovery of women’s bodies all over Ekurhuleni, it tells you that this issue has real consequences for real people.”

What the commission has heard

The Madlanga Commission has spent a year taking evidence on organised crime inside the police service. Ramafoko told eNCA the hearings have exposed a system that has been “crippled to serve the public by organised crime that has infiltrated the police”.

Her argument is that the hearings are necessary and that their necessity is itself the problem. “As good as they are and as important as they are, they are an indictment on the billions that we are paying public service to guard our democracy,” she said.

She added: “And again, it is the vulnerable. It is the poor. It is those that are always at the bottom of their society, which is black women, that are suffering the consequences of a very corrupt, infiltrated police service.”

Ramafoko also said the country should not need a commission to achieve real accountability in the police sector.

What the state has done

The commission is itself the state’s response, and it is sitting. It has subpoenaed evidence, heard witnesses under oath and put the inner workings of police units on the public record across a year of hearings. That is not nothing. It is the most sustained public examination of policing this country has run.

The South African Police Service has continued to investigate the Ekurhuleni deaths while the hearings proceed. Each case is a murder investigation, and murder is a crime under South African law. Anyone who kills is answerable in court, and the authority to investigate and prosecute rests with the state and not with anyone else.

What the families of the nine women need now is what every family in that position needs, which is an arrest, a prosecution and a court date.

The question that remains

Ramafoko’s point is not that the commission has failed. It is that a commission is a substitute for accountability and not the thing itself. If the systems that are supposed to catch corruption in the police worked, the hearings would not be necessary, and the bodies in Ekurhuleni would be the subject of prosecutions rather than a pattern.

That is the question the commission’s final recommendations will have to answer. A finding is a document. A dismissal, a prosecution and a conviction is accountability.

The commission continues its public hearings. Its recommendations, once delivered, will go to the President for action, and the test of the past year will be what happens to them after that.

Source: eNCA, Black women pay the price - Corruption Watch on ‘crippled’ policing system