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When the Eastern Cape Customary Male Initiation Practice Act was promulgated in 2016, it was hoped that it would end the unnecessary and avoidable deaths of young boys in initiation schools.
But boys continue to die, like the 17 who perished this past initiation season.
Unless something drastic is done, many more will continue to die in the name of tradition.
Every initiation season we count the number of dead boys, a practice that is now its own tradition.
Talks, seminars, conferences and media campaigns costing millions of rands have little impact.
Monitoring teams, initiation forums, traditional leaders and government have failed to prevent the deaths of young men at the hands of unscrupulous, bogus traditional surgeons.
The Eastern Cape government has no database of registered and trained traditional surgeons and nurses, thereby opening the door to bogus practitioners.
The one they have was compiled in 2013 and has not been updated since, despite numerous requests from this newspaper.
Bogus traditional surgeons run amok, using the sacred rite as a way to make a quick buck.
Boys as young as 10 years old are illegally circumcised in exchange for anything from money and clothes to cellphones, chickens and alcohol.
The bogus surgeons are known to the government, which names them at every seminar.
One such man is Mtshiyelwa “Mtshayina” Ndoda, who has illegally circumcised hundreds of boys.
Former cooperative governance and traditional affairs MEC Fikile Xasa once said the police and his department tried to arrest him after spotting him in a forest near Libode, but their helicopter had no place to land.
But City Press tracked him down to his village in 2016, where he admitted to performing illegal circumcisions on boys as young as 10 years old.
A single journalist tracked him down when the entire state machinery could not.
In the three years since the new act was passed, a number of men have been arrested but not a single one has been convicted.
The law provides for a 25-year sentence for those found responsible for initiate deaths, but no one has been jailed.
Instead, last year an illegal traditional surgeon was prosecuted under the old law and slapped with a fine of a mere R8 000 for circumcising a 15-year-old boy without his parents’ permission.
Read: R8000 fine for bogus traditional surgeon convicted of circumcising underage boy
It is clear that we are not interested in saving lives.
