The news of the passing of one of our Ikamvanites has come as a shock to the IkamvaYouth family. Thembakazi Nyakatya joined IkamvaYouth in 2008 while she was doing grade 10. As a young girl from the township, education was the only option for her to become successful. Despite the peer pressure young girls experience in townships she chose education and kept up her attendance until she matriculated in 2010. While she was in grade 12, her positive influence encouraged her little brother Unathi Nyakatya to join the programme, thereafter her second brother Bazise Nyakatya in 2012. In 2011 Thembakazi came back to IkamvaYouth as a tutor. She believed that her background could not be an obstacle to achieving her goals, and it wasn’t. In 2014 she graduated with a diploma in Management at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. In April 2016, while she was sick in hospital, she missed her BTech graduation.
Thembakazi was a role model not only to her siblings, but to many in the IkamvaYouth family and the community at large. We would like to express our condolences to her family. Lala Ngoxolo Thembsie.