As South Africans, we are watching the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry unfold like a national autopsy, exposing how corruption and political interference have eaten away at the very heart of our criminal justice system.
Day after day, names are mentioned, documents are tabled, and the rot becomes impossible to deny. Yet as I follow these proceedings, one haunting question refuses to leave me: where is the Commission of Inquiry into Gender-Based and Child Sexual Violence?
Because if our justice system is so compromised that political loyalty can decide who is investigated, who is prosecuted, and who is protected, then we must ask — how many GBV and child sexual violence cases have been lost, silenced, or deliberately buried because the perpetrators were connected, privileged, or simply given another “second chance”? For survivors, these are not abstract questions. They are the cruel realities that shape our daily lives.
For years, we have watched perpetrators walk free while victims fight to be heard. We have seen abusers violate protection orders with no consequences. We have seen women murdered by men who should have been behind bars long ago. We have seen dockets disappear, cases collapse, and survivors retraumatised by the very institutions meant to protect them. This is not justice — it is betrayal. It is a justice system that has lost its soul.
I still think of the case of Regan Gertze, the 11-year-old boy from Tulbagh who was raped and murdered in 2020 by a man who should never have been free. The man, 55-year-old Petoors, was out on parole for rape at the time.
The court later heard that this was not his first offence — not his second, not even his third. It was his fourth conviction for a sexual offence and his sixth conviction for a violent crime.
His first sexual offence was committed in 1983, when he was just 17. He had been in and out of prison his entire life, yet the system still saw fit to release him into a community where children played. And just three months after his parole, he raped and murdered Regan.
That case still haunts me. It haunts many South Africans. Because what does it say about a justice system that gives predators the benefit of the doubt, over and over again, while victims are offered only condolences and statistics? What does it say about the value of a child’s life when repeat offenders are allowed to roam free?
And Regan’s case is not an isolated tragedy. The killer of Uyinene Mrwetyana, too, was a parolee. How many lives must be lost before we admit that these are not coincidences — they are consequences of a system that refuses to learn, refuses to act, and refuses to protect the vulnerable? Each one of these names — Uyinene, Regan, Namhla — is a mirror reflecting our nation’s moral failure.
This is why I keep asking: where is the Commission of Inquiry into GBVF and Child Sexual Violence? Because behind every delayed docket, every unprosecuted case, and every parolee-turned-predator are layers of negligence, complicity, and silence.
The Madlanga Commission is showing us how deep political interference runs — how corruption erodes justice from the inside out. We cannot pretend that gender-based and child sexual violence cases are somehow exempt from this disease.
Even the Public Protector’s Report of June 2024, released by Advocate Kholeka Gcaleka, confirmed what survivors and activists have been shouting for years: that the justice system routinely fails victims of sexual and gender-based violence.
The report detailed how police investigations are sloppy, how departments fail to coordinate, and how survivors face secondary victimisation from officials who treat their pain as a nuisance. That was not an NGO’s finding — it was the finding of the state itself. And still, nothing has changed. Women and children continue to die while we debate reforms that never come.
If this country can establish commissions into state capture, assassinations, and corruption in the highest offices, then surely it can also confront the systemic failure to protect women and children.
Why not summon police commissioners, parole boards, prosecutors, magistrates, and ministers to answer — under oath — for the broken systems that keep letting monsters back into our communities? Why not demand accountability for every decision that led to another Regan, another Uyinene, another Namhla?
GBVF is not just a social crisis — it is a justice crisis. Every uninvestigated case, every ignored protection order, every murdered child is proof that our system is collapsing from within.
A Commission of Inquiry into GBVF and Child Sexual Violence must be survivor-led, fearless, and uncompromising. It must uncover how proximity to power, gender bias, and institutional incompetence intersect to deny victims justice. It must expose why victims wait for years while perpetrators walk free.
It must demand accountability not just from individuals but from the entire machinery that allows these failures to continue.
South Africa owes its women and children more than sympathy. It owes us justice, truth, and action. The time for commissions that protect power is over. The time for a commission that protects the people is now.
Because until justice works for the most vulnerable — for the Regans, the Uyinens, and the countless others whose names we will never know — it does not work at all.
