LET’S SING IN ONE VOICE

 Sir,

Have you ever thought about that wonderful and beautiful sound that comes out when male voices sing together?

Well I have been thinking how wonderful it would be if men could join the  fight against gender-based violence in the country and sing in one voice with women and girls and shout enough to the killings, rape and other forms of inhuman treatment on our mothers, sisters and daughters.

Gender-based violence has taken another level in the country and it appears we are too silent as men and the silence is too loud to be ignored. No matter how successful women and girls’ programmes can be, they can address part of the problem.

Most boys think it is okay for a man to beat a woman when he has been provoked. Violence is learned and therefore it can be unlearned.
The time to stand up as Swazi men is now; sing in harmony with those who are already fighting the scourge. Let us not make it a women’s issue but we should make it our problem as we have lost our mothers, sisters, friends, daughters and colleagues. We should not this issue be the police, God’s or government’s problem.

This has been giving me sleepless nights because we know that every human’s days are in God’s hands, but today there are people who decide to cut short the lives and potential of many women and girls thus bringing into disrepute the good name of many men who don’t believe and do not use violence against women. We cannot sit and watch while the safety of our own is being compromised in our name as men.

S Makama

NOTE:

SWAGAA mentioned in a previous right to reply that they have realised the need to empower the girl, boy child in order to navigate through the issue of abuse between couples.

 It has an existing programme called the Girls Empowerment Club Programme which seeks to provide every Swazi girl-child in school the platform to learn more about life’s skills, societal issues and these topics include measures on how to avoid these issues.

And in order to balance the scales between girls and boys, SWAGAA recently introduced another empowerment programme focusing on adolescent boys who are in and out of school empowering them on similar programmes as the girls club and also encouraging them on positive masculinity where they are encouraged to use their manly masculinity in a positive way through their daily lives which would inevitably decrease the level of GBV cases in the kingdom.

Ed

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