NGCUKAITOBI: MEN DON’T DESERVE POWER TO END PATRIARCHY

LRM EXPORT 361151091892376 20190919 151343415 300x226The toxic male culture of “ii-way” and “projects” – catcalls objectifying women within leadership structures – has not changed since long-gone liberation struggle days says WSU convocation president, Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi.

WSU convocation and alumni engaged in discussions at the East London Guild Theatre with various other university student leaders who faced leadership challenges.

Ngcukaitobi vented to a stunned audience about how he was imbued into the culture of “projects” when he first joined student leadership structures in university.

“Until this day it’s still the same thing happening, done by people who should know better than we did,” he lamented.

Ngcukaitobi spoke firmly about how nobody teaches boy children social discourse with girls.

“I had no one to teach me how to relate to women. I had to learn it in the streets,” he said.

Taking personal responsibility, Ngcukaitobi confessed to having been part of the problem currently facing South Africa. This comes days after a senseless spree of rapes and other gender-based-violence occurrences across the country and universities.

“I don’t know how I ended up here because I was raised by women. How on earth it happened that suddenly I’m part of this monstrosity in society astonishes me,” added Ngcukaitobi.

Undeterred, he emphasized that personal purification could not be achieved until men conceded to being the problem; saying all men have scandals they have committed against women.

“We hide in the midst of the new culture of men being outed on social media. It (culture) is very powerful because every time you see a name popping up there’s a sense of shock, and that shock is an identification of the problem and how it has actually become normal,” Ngcukaitobi said.

He also added that the root of the problem may have stemmed from absent fathers.

“Our fathers were absent because they worked in the mines. We were raised by women, but somehow patriarchy has overtaken us,” said Ngcukaitobi.

After the cattle killings of Nongqawuse between 1856 and 1857 Xhosa men left the Eastern Cape to work in the Gauteng mines in the thousands.

By: Sinawo Hermans