Calling GBV an urgent disaster is not useful until someone does something about it
Students protest against gender-based violence (GBV) at parliament in Cape Town. Image for illustrative purposes. Picture: Gallo Images/Nardus Engelbrecht
Woohoo, guess what we got! A whole new council! Why? Because how do we solve problems in this country? By setting up a WhatsApp group… obviously!
Now what’s nice about that is that once you’ve set up the WhatsApp group, you can tell all the people who you are representing that you’ve set up the group. You don’t need to tell them there’s nobody but yourself in that WhatsApp group. Today’s WhatsApp group in question: the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide!
This group was conceptualised by a bill in 2021, established by an Act in 2024 and remained silent with no participants until the last day of July 2026.
You’d think that if you declared gender-based violence a national disaster on the basis that, among other things, over 10 000 women are being killed a year by an intimate partner, it wouldn’t take so long to put some people in the dormant WhatsApp group that was created to deal with it.
When the Act was signed into law, there was all sorts of praise for it, with the ANC parliamentary caucus excited that it “brings hope that there will be more efforts with a legislative mandate to help fight GBVF”.
It must be quite an awkward thing to tell the families of late victims and survivors themselves that your answer to their plight was a WhatsApp group that you conceptualised six years ago, put on paper five years ago, confirmed and set up two years ago and then lamented the absence of any effect by declaring GBV a national emergency eight months ago… oh and then only now, adding people to the group.
Somehow, we’re supposed to cheer that? Take us seriously.
Perhaps I am being rude by calling a whole national council a WhatsApp group but just reading about it gives that same feeling everybody gets when they’re added to another WhatsApp group: do we really need another WhatsApp group?
Maybe they’ll do something to improve the GBV situation in South Africa. If one looks at the objects according to the Act though, one may have doubts. The council has three objects – coordination, set priorities and facilitate sharing of information.
If the bureaucracy of six years to get to this point teaches us anything about coordination, it’s that adding another layer to the decision-making matrix is hardly a step in the right direction.
The setting of the priorities is great and all but reading deeper, it must be aligned with the national strategy and the person setting that out took two years to put people in this WhatsApp group.
The facilitating of sharing information part? Well what else is a WhatsApp group good for. So as condescending as it may be, until shown otherwise, the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide is no better than a WhatsApp group. Oh, but best believe they’ll be getting paid.
To the Act’s credit, it does go into a bit of detail about what the expectations of the council are and number one is quite specific: “Develop an action plan, not later than six months after its establishment, for the implementation of the national strategy addressing gender-based violence and femicide.”
Sadly, this strategy has been in publication since 2020 but we only just got the names of the people selected to execute it. Some disaster of a disaster this is – the kind where you can call it a disaster and then kick the can into an empty WhatsApp group that you’ll fill down the line.
I hope that by 1 February 2027, I will be writing about how awesome the strategy to combat GBV is. It’s just that the way this process has gone so far, calling it urgent is more important than treating it as urgent and you can’t deal with an urgent disaster in a WhatsApp group. Somewhere, someone has to do something.
