A glimmer of hope remains that one day we will end femicide scourge
The killing machine we wrote about in this space, lamenting the senseless murders of women seems not to be slowing down one bit. In this edition, Sunday World is telling the stories of more women falling victim to the scourge that just slightly over a week ago had the entire nation enraged at the senselessness and brutality of it all.
Today we have among the horror tales, that of the confession of a man who killed his own sister and buried her remains. He lived with his secret for more than a year, until the guilt of it all gnawed at him to out his dark secret.
The sister was all along officially listed as missing. She has now joined the victim list of a wave of femicide that inexplicably and incessantly continues to batter this country. God knows what unspeakable crimes were visited upon these women, before the killers decided they had to be silenced forever.
It has hardly been 10 days since the remains of Olorato Mongale were interred, yet the body count of women continues to pile up. We hasten to point out that these are in no way verified numbers but since the news of her death, we are afraid to report that at least 10 women have been murdered.
Despite the horrifying and stupefying numbers, we have reason to believe that this is not an entirely lost war. There are enough pockets of excellence in our monumentally inadequate justice system to trust that we will turn a corner someday.
However, there are certain things we will need to attend to if we are to see substantial progress as we attempt to take the fight to the seemingly insurmountable odds we are facing at the moment.
First up fixing the criminal justice organs at the coalface of the war. National Director of Public Prosecutions Adv Shamila Batohi, who heads the National Prosecuting Authority, came to the office with much fanfare and hope that her arrival heralded a bright new day.
We have, however, seen the NPA fumble at many hurdles and fail to successfully prosecute what many thought to be low-hanging fruit rendered easy pickings by the Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture led by former chief justice Raymond Zondo.
One such case currently in the courts is the asbestos trial in Free State, starring former premier and ex-ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule and controversial tenderpreneur Edwin Sodi.
Now it seems we should not hold our breath for a successful prosecution.
Magashule’s former PA and fellow co-accused Moroadi Cholota won the first round against the NPA when the ruling in the trial within a trial in which she challenged her extradition from the US went her way.
There were similar outcomes in cases of lesser prominence that once captured attention, such the matter in which a white former University of Free State student who urinated on the laptop of a black fellow student walked away scot free because the state, read NPA and the police, had failed to provide enough evidence to secure a conviction.
It is the failure to tuck away such easy pickings that test the nation’s faith in the state’s ability to win a greater war such as the rampant femicide scourge we face.
