Nine bodies in Ekurhuleni as police corruption case returns to court

At least nine women have been found dead in Ekurhuleni, and the political parties contesting the city say the killings are the price of a police service and a municipality that have stopped working.

The bodies were discovered in the industrial city east of Johannesburg, prompting a temporary lockdown of Ekurhuleni while police worked the cases. The killings have revived a longer record in the same city. In 2024, 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. On New Year’s Day last year, the body of a five-year-old girl was found in a veld in Duduza after she was allegedly raped and stabbed to death. In Wattville in 2022, four-year-old Bokgabo Poo was abducted, raped, murdered and her body mutilated by a man who was out on bail for the alleged rape of a nine-year-old girl.

The state’s own conduct sits at the centre of the argument. Ekurhuleni has been named the first respondent at the Madlanga Commission, where police officers stand accused of murder, extortion and corruption. Suspended Ekurhuleni Metro Police Department deputy chief Julius Mkhwanazi was granted R10 000 bail this week in the latest blue-lights corruption case. He remains in custody while a separate bail application is decided in connection with the 2022 murder of businessman Emmanuel Mbense, whose body was allegedly dumped at a dam near Nigel. Mkhwanazi and five co-accused, some of them police officers, face charges of murder, robbery with aggravating circumstances and defeating or obstructing the administration of justice. He has been found to have close ties with underworld figure Vusumuzi Matlala.

The Economic Freedom Fighters’ Gauteng finance MEC, Nkululeko Dunga, a former Ekurhuleni MMC for finance, said the city’s leadership crisis did not create the motive for the killings but had created the room for them. He told the Mail & Guardian that policing had become ineffective and that political and administrative leadership had failed.

“There is criminality amongst the state itself. Blue-light hijackings have been done by police.”

Dunga said bodies were being dumped across the city while residents had lost confidence in the police, partly because officers charged with the same offences keep appearing in the dock. He pointed to the capture of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, which he said was visible even at the Madlanga Commission. He added that many areas have no streetlights and no CCTV cameras, and that long grass has been left standing, conditions he said allow crime to thrive. “There is no accountability and justice in the city,” he said.

The Democratic Alliance’s Ekurhuleni mayoral candidate, Khathu Rasilingwana, said criminals read the dysfunction and act on it. Streetlights do not work, she said, and for the longest time the city had a chief of police who was suspended for two years. Almost 300 Ekurhuleni Metro Police Department vehicles are stuck in workshops, she said, which means officers are not visible in communities. “You had Julius Mkhwanazi arrested literally every Friday,” she said. “They also know that EMPD does not have vehicles.”

The state’s answer

ANC treasurer-general Gwen Ramokgopa said the women killed in Ekurhuleni are not statistics. “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,” she told the Mail & Guardian’s podcast on Wednesday.

Ramokgopa said she met the ANC Women’s League secretary-general, the Gauteng MEC for social development and several ministers on Tuesday to ask them to combine efforts on the killings. She said she had raised the matter with the minister of police and the police 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.

She said men had to join the response, noting that men led by the president had already stood up to say “not in our name”. She called for consequences, prevention and for South Africa to be as safe for a girl as it is for a boy. She said crime and drug use are likely contributing factors, and that sociologists and psychologists should be brought in to understand what drives the men who commit these acts. “Any measure of abuse is one measure too many,” she said.

The immediate question for the families is the slow one. Nine sets of relatives are waiting for post-mortems, for identification, for arrests and for court dates. The city’s residents are waiting for streetlights that work, for vehicles that leave the workshops and for officers who are not themselves accused. Until those things change, the lockdown is the only visible thing the state has been able to put on the street.

Mkhwanazi’s bail application in the Mbense murder case is still before the court. The Madlanga Commission’s record on Ekurhuleni police conduct remains open.

Source: Mail & Guardian, Women pay for leadership failures