‘We have the laws’: What South Africa still doesn’t have
· The South African
Every year, South Africa marks Women’s Month with campaigns, marches and national attention on gender-based violence.
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Yet every year, once September 1 arrives and spring begins, that same attention quietly fades, right as the crisis it was responding to keeps going.
Minister for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities Sindisiwe Chikunga has publicly acknowledged this exact pattern, saying:
“We have the laws. We now have the council. What we do not yet have is a fall in the number of funerals.”
what the minister is actually calling for
Speaking this week, Chikunga urged the media to move beyond covering announcements and instead “follow the money.”
She wants reporters tracking how much of the country’s R1.5 trillion procurement pipeline actually reaches women-owned businesses.
She also wants individual GBV cases followed from the police station all the way through to conviction.
Her point was blunt: “an announcement makes a headline and delivery makes a life.”
She’s therefore proposed a standing quarterly partnership between her department, the National Press Club, Unisa’s School of Business and Leadership, and research institutions.
ts purpose would be to publicly assess whether Women’s Month commitments are actually being implemented, not just announced.
Chikunga also confirmed the launch of a new National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide.
This council is tasked with coordinating government, civil society and business efforts, and monitoring implementation of the National Strategic Plan on GBVF.
Citing the latest South African Medical Research Council femicide study, she noted that three women are killed by an intimate partner every single day in South Africa, a rate five times the global average.
her fight, and the countless mothers who share it
KwaZulu-Natal mother Jessica Naidoo has spent nearly four years fighting for accountability.
Her daughter, Sasha Lee Shah, was shot and killed in a shopping centre parking lot in October 2022.
The attacker was an ex-boyfriend Sasha had an active protection order against.
The officer heading the Phoenix police station’s domestic violence unit had failed to remove the man’s firearm, as that protection order required.
Naidoo believes this failure directly enabled her daughter’s death.
The officer received only a two-month suspension and was moved out of the unit.
Naidoo has since taken her fight to the Madlanga Commission.
She is now pushing for new legislation, named after her daughter, to close the gap that let a police failure like this go largely unpunished.
Specifically, she wants stronger enforcement of court-ordered firearm removals in domestic violence cases.
It’s genuinely hard to read Chikunga’s own words and not feel the weight of them.
We have the laws, we have the council, and still, the funerals haven’t stopped.
Honestly, reading this upsets me. I’m deeply passionate about seeing real change happen, not just more promises.
Do you think South Africa’s attention on GBV fades too quickly once Women’s Month ends?
Let us know in the comments below…