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On 13 January 2026, Daily Maverick published an article headlined “The return of Waterkloof Four’s ‘God’s child’, and the gravity of violence, privilege and media”.
In the article, we gave the name of a member of the Waterkloof Four – four Pretoria teens convicted of the brutal murder of a homeless man in 2001 – who was recently accused of further wrongdoing.
It has since been brought to our attention that naming that individual is in contravention of the Criminal Procedure Act (CPA) since a 2022 amendment to the legislation.
Section 154 (3) now prohibits revealing the identity of a person who was under the age of 18 years at the time of the commission of an offence – regardless of whether they were named by the media before the amendment to the legislation came into effect.
The law does not apply retroactively, which means that media produced before 2022 that name such individuals is still acceptable. This creates a strange situation where anyone can Google the Waterkloof Four and instantly establish the identity of the four perpetrators, but media wishing to reflect back on such a case – or report on criminal developments involving one of the perpetrators – cannot name them without facing the possibility of criminal prosecution.
Although the principle that someone who has committed a trivial, youthful indiscretion should not be haunted by it for a lifetime is sound, one has to question whether public interest is served in withholding the identity of someone who has committed as serious a crime as murder, especially given the highly limited evidence that the South African prison system serves a genuine function in terms of rehabilitation.
The amendment also prohibits identifying the victims of crime who are under the age of 18, even if they themselves wish to speak openly about their experience. An adult wishing to write their own memoir reflecting on their own experience of child abuse in South Africa, for instance, would technically be breaking the law.
These are significant issues which the South African National Editors’ Forum attempted to point out to Parliament before the adoption of the legislation, but without success.
We apologise for the error. We also apologise to Rapport for the implication that this publication may in some way have been derelict in failing to name the individual in question in its own reporting, since Rapport was complying with the CPA. DM