Another woman is dead.

Police found her body on the side of the road in Olifantsfontein on Monday 14 September 2026. She became the fifth woman dead in the Kempton Park area since July.

One of them was Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo. She went for a run on Wednesday 9 September and did not come home. Her family identified her body at the Germiston mortuary on Monday 14 September.

Police say they found the five women half-naked, with visible bruises. Deputy National Police Commissioner Tebello Mosikili confirmed that someone sexually molested most of them. Two remain unidentified.

These are not crime statistics. They are women who had plans, families and ordinary days ahead of them.

The vigilance we did not ask for

Every time a woman dies, the conversation turns to what she should have done differently.

Don’t run alone. Don’t walk at night. Share your location. Tell someone where you are. Watch your surroundings. Check the back seat. Call when you arrive.

Women already do all of this. Survival has become a second job. We calculate risk before doing ordinary things running, walking to the car, taking a taxi, leaving work late.

And still, women die.

The state cannot outsource public safety to the people it should protect.

When the horn stayed silent

The first body appeared near the R21 on Wednesday 15 July. Police arrested a suspect on Friday 17 July. A second body surfaced on Monday 24 August. Elizabeth left for her run on Wednesday 9 September. The third body turned up the next day, Thursday 10 September. A fourth Elizabeth’s on Saturday 12 September. A fifth on Monday 14 September.

Had the alarm sounded when that first body appeared on 15 July, had someone shared information with the communities living in its shadow, would the other four still be alive?

We will never know, because the horn stayed silent.

Instead, a second woman died. Then a third. It took Elizabeth’s disappearance the fourth for the country to pay attention.

She became the alarm. She became the sacrifice.

And the burden of raising that alarm fell on her eight-year-old daughter, who sat at home waiting for her mother to return from her evening run. When 6.30pm passed and the door stayed closed, that child told the family something was wrong.

Her uncle, Andries Matlala, called it an iconic moment. I call it a failure so complete that it left a child to do the state’s job.

That girl will carry the memory of that evening for the rest of her life the moment she realised her mother was not coming home. That is a trauma no child should inherit, and no government should have allowed.

A reactive state

South Africa has become a reactive state. We wait for the crisis, then respond. The country waits for the protest before listening. Officials wait for the death before asking whether anyone saw the warning signs.

Then come the statements, the condolences, the task teams and the promises. Until the next tragedy.

The government declared Gender-Based Violence and Femicide (GBVF) a national disaster. The National Council on GBVF held its first meeting on Monday 31 August 2026, under the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Act of 2024. Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities Sindisiwe Chikunga called it “the institutionalisation of a national commitment.”

Those are important words. But institutions cannot become substitutes for action.

A declaration does not prevent violence. Strategy means nothing without implementation. A structure does not create accountability. And a government statement cannot bring a woman home.

The journalist’s view

As a journalist, I see another side of this crisis. Every day, I enter communities to do my job knocking on doors, following leads and asking questions that make institutions uncomfortable.

I take precautions and assess my surroundings. But vigilance does not guarantee safety, and “it comes with the job” should never become an acceptable response to those who threaten journalists while they serve the public.

We also know what it means to chase information that should be accessible. Nobody returns our calls. Nobody answers our emails. We follow up and ask again. Too often, extracting information that should flow freely from public institutions to the public requires persistence.

Had someone shared it when the first body appeared on 15 July, perhaps Elizabeth would still be alive. Perhaps her daughter would still be waiting for her at the door, not mourning her at a mortuary.

The question

We have normalised the abnormal. The country has become accustomed to mourning, to hashtags, to candlelight vigils, to ministers expressing shock, to promises, to bodies.

Women should not have to die for the state to discover that women are in danger. Journalists should not have to expose institutional failure before institutions decide to function. And an eight-year-old should not have to raise the alarm that the state failed to sound.

We should not measure a government only by how it responds to a crisis. We should measure it by how many crises it prevents.

Because if the state only wakes up when there is a body, then the question is no longer whether it knows we are unsafe. The question is whether it has accepted our deaths as the price of doing business.