Ndabeni tells Cape Town summit men must stand up as ninth Ekurhuleni body is found

A ninth woman has been found dead in Ekurhuleni in two months, and the country’s small business minister used a continental entrepreneurship summit in Cape Town to say the economy cannot be built while women are afraid in their homes.

Small Business Development Minister Stella Ndabeni was addressing delegates at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress Africa 2026 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre on Thursday when she turned from business, innovation and regulation to the killings in Gauteng.

As IOL reported on 17 September, the body of a woman believed to be in her 30s was found that morning in an open space in Lama Street, Villa Lisa, Boksburg. That discovery brought the number of women found dead in Ekurhuleni to nine in two months.

What the minister said

Ndabeni told the hall that the killings must weigh on the conscience of everyone in the country, and she put the responsibility well beyond the women in the room.

“We cannot celebrate women entrepreneurs on our stages while women are being violated and killed beyond this conference’s walls,” she said. “This is not a matter of women alone.”

She invited entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, innovators and diplomatic partners present to take a stand, and she invoked the women who marched in 1956.

Her argument was that prosperity and safety are the same project. “The Africa and the world we are building must not only be prosperous, it must be safe,” she said. “Freedom without personal safety is incomplete freedom. Men must stand up. Communities must stand up. Business must stand up. Governments must act. Society must refuse to normalise violence against women and children.”

She said the measure of the continent would not be the size of its economies alone, but whether an African girl can grow up free and an African woman can walk without fear.

Why a business minister said it

Ndabeni’s portfolio is small business, and that is the part of her remarks a South African reader should hold on to. Women make up a large share of the informal traders, spaza owners and small enterprises that keep households running, and a country where women cannot move safely to a market, a taxi rank or a place of work is a country where those businesses do not open.

She made the link herself, telling delegates that no one can speak about building prosperous economies while women are afraid in their homes and communities.

What the record shows on the killings

The nine deaths in Ekurhuleni over two months are the subject of an active police investigation, and the discovery in Boksburg is the most recent case in that sequence.

The South African Police Service has not said the cases are linked. That absence is itself information for residents of the affected areas, who have been told what is confirmed and what is not.

Gauteng has the country’s busiest caseload of violent crime, and its police and forensic services carry the pressure of it. Family violence, femicide and the killing of women by people they know remain the hardest cases to prevent, because they happen behind closed doors rather than on a street corner.

What happens next

GEC+Africa 2026 continues at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, where Ndabeni’s remarks will be recorded in the summit’s programme alongside the business sessions she came to deliver.

In Ekurhuleni, the police investigation into the nine deaths continues, and the question residents will keep asking is the one the minister put to the hall: who acts, and when.

Source: IOL, ‘This is not a matter of women alone,’ says Minister Ndabeni as she addresses GBV at GEC+Africa 2026