Over 500 South African children murdered since last year

A total of 546 South African children were murdered in the first six months of the year, according to an Al Jazeera report.

An average of three South African children are killed each day.

In the first quarter of the year, April to June, 243 South African children were murdered, according to SAPS crime statistics.

Between October and December 2021, 352 South African children were murdered.

In the latest child killing that has rocked the nation, a 4-year-old girl, Bokgabo Poo, was kidnapped, raped, and mutilated.

The suspect was out on bail for allegedly raping a 9-year-old girl.

Poo’s father, Irvin Ndlovu, 32, saw the man accused of killing his child in court this week and tried to attack him before he was held back by friends and members of the SAPS.

Ndlovu was reported saying his father was murdered when he was a child and now he has to go through losing his own child in the same way, doubting his recovery from the incident.

“My father was murdered 18 years ago. There’s moments where I just cry over what happened to my dad and now I have a daughter who gets murdered as well. I don’t think this is something that one can recover from,” Ndlovu told Al Jazeera.

At the start of the year, the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) said it was appalled by the number of children murdered daily.

“We are in an urgent race to save children’s lives. We cannot and should not accept such high levels of child murders every day,” Unicef’s Christine Muhigana said.

These brutal murders come off the back of the government’s attempt to plug a hole in gender-based violence, which has been constantly rising, according to police statistics.

Opposition parties have questioned Police Minister Bheki Cele’s leadership on numerous occasions, calling for his resignation as crime has appeared to have taken over the country.

From high murder rates and rape to stealing government property such as cables, pipes, fuel and even cooking oil, levels of crime in South Africa have drastically increased since pre-Covid.

“The DA cannot stand by and watch as the women and children are being murdered and raped in their own homes. That is why yesterday, the DA-led City of Cape Town sent an official request to Minister Cele formally requesting the devolution of police powers to the City of Cape Town so that the SAPS can be more effective in conjunction with the City’s Law Enforcement Advancement Programme (LEAP) officers,” the DA reported in August.