In the year 2022, there were 27,000 murders in South Africa. The homicide figures in South Africa are dismal regardless of how you look at it. Between April 2022 and March 2023, almost 27,000 people were murdered—possibly the most ever recorded in a single year.
In 1994, during the height of the low-intensity civil war in Kwazulu-Natal and Gauteng, nearly the same number of people were murdered; nevertheless, due of the increase in population from 40 to 60 million, the homicide rate now is still lower than it was in 1994.
During the 2022 calendar year, there were 520 murders committed in South Africa per week on average. Based on the information at hand, this is one of the highest murder rates in the world.
For years, chronic violence has been part of the South African reality. High levels of fatal violence have become normalised, as if they are an inevitable consequence of other social problems such as unemployment, hunger, poverty and inequality.
These problems seem overwhelming – with no clear vision of what can be done. But South Africans shouldn’t accept the continuing high number of killings. Murder can be reduced. By focusing on the places, people and behaviours most regularly associated with lethal violence, the police and their partners can turn this around.
Targeting the risk factors contributing to murder, bringing those individuals responsible to justice, and disrupting the networks that support them, can help decrease this crime.
Murder results from other forms of crime and violence, from domestic abuse to street robbery and organised crime. Multiple other social crises should not distract us from focusing on murder and other forms of crime and violence that it is linked to.
Several facts:
The number of murders this past year may be the highest on record. The previous highest is 1995/6 (just under 27,000).
The murder rate (46 per 100,000) is still some way below the early to mid-1990s (different sources give different estimates but approximately 65 per 100,000 people per year at the time).
There’s currently a 4 to 5% chance that your cause of death in South Africa will be murder.
According to an article published in March by the Institute of Security Studies, South Africa now has the second highest murder rate in the world. Only Jamaica is worse. But note that many countries cannot measure their murder rate accurately. Also the number of deaths by violence in war zones are disputed and complicate things.
While murders dropped appreciably during the first year of Covid, especially during the hard lockdowns, the number of murders in 2020/21 still exceeded 2016/17.
Since Bheki Cele became Minister of Police in 2018, the murder rate has increased from 36 to 46 per 100,000. In the half-decade before he took this position (and after he was removed as National Police Commissioner in 2011) the situation was already deteriorating.
The global homicide rate declined from 2010 to 2020, from about 6 per 100,000 to 5.4 per 100,000, while the South African homicide rate increased dramatically over this period.
