Women and girls under rape siege

The story of how Mduduzi Mathibela, Edmore Ndlovu, together with Thabo Nkala and nine other members of their gang, attacked two young couples who were taking a midday stroll through the park, bound the hands of their male partners behind their backs before throwing them into a nearby dam, where both drowned and died, stunned the courtroom into a deafening silence.

What happened to the two women several moments later that day was related to Judge Papi Mosopa at the South Gauteng Supreme Court in Johannesburg, by the two victims in a crime that stunned many South Africans into numbness and shock. At the mercy of their captors and fearing for their lives, the two were humiliated beyond belief before they were sexually molested and abused.

Testifying before the Gauteng High Court judge, one of the women told the court in graphic detail how, while their bewildered husbands were being led towards the dam with their hands tied behind their backs, one of the thugs, believed to be the leader, poked her with a knife before commanding her to turn around. “He demanded I bend down,” she told the judge.

The rest of the details of what the two women endured at the hands of their assailants that fateful day at the Kensington park is just too ghastly to publish.

Sadly, this sort of violent crime happens far too often to hundreds of young men and their spouses, who are the most vulnerable and who are often the targeted victims during these attacks.

And just when you think you’ve heard enough of this type of violent sexual brutality against women, you read about the evil Quantum taxi rapists who’ve been preying on innocent and unsuspecting women from as far back as 2015.

I shudder to think that it took the terrifying ordeal of a mother who was molested and abused for four hours in the presence of her 10-year-old son by a gang of rapists driving in a Quantum minibus for the many more females who have been terrorised by probably the same gang to stand up and be publicly counted.

Even more worrying are accusations levelled against the police by some of the Quantum taxi rape survivors. Some of them claim they’ve had no response despite having reported their sexual attacks at the different police stations. A few of them said they did not even bother to report their ordeal to the police because they did not want to become a statistic in the police’s national crime reports.

As the nation ushers in the former sports minister, Fikile Mbalula, as the new minister responsible for the country’s police, let us hope that crimes against women and girls will be given an even higher priority by the police in our communities.

Defying lawful authority is a criminal offence

The open defiance shown by the self-made charismatic Doom Prophet of the north against a legal judgment instructing him to refrain from spraying members of his congregants with the pesticide known as Doom, borders on criminality.

Of course, it is this type of insolence that has made damaged many of our people’s perception of freedom and democracy.

Why on earth would someone be so blatantly dumb as Prophet Doom when the facts against his ignorance are staring him straight in his face?

How I sometimes long for the simplicity of ordinary South Africans before democracy became a fashionable statement of reasoning among charlatans, con men and other societal freeloaders.

Katlehong man (56) accused of raping girl (10) |