Tembeka Nicholas Ngcukaitobi (25 December 1976) is a South African lawyer, public speaker, author and political activist. He is a member of the

South African Law Reform Commission The South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC) is a law reform commission which investigates the state of South African law and makes proposals for its reform to Parliament and the provincial legislatures. It is an independent advisory statutory ...

(SALRC). Ngcukaitobi has authored the book ''The Land Is Ours: South Africa's First Black Lawyers and the birth of Constitutionalism''.

Early years

Ngcukaitobi studied his undergraduate at the University of Transkei and finished his LLB at Rhodes University. Early in his career, he served as law clerk to Chief Justice

Arthur Chaskalson Arthur Chaskalson Order of the Baobab, SCOB, (24 November 1931 – 1 December 2012) was President of the Constitutional Court of South Africa from 1994 to 2001 and Chief Justice of South Africa from 2001 to 2005. Chaskalson was a member of the ...

at the

Constitutional Court of South Africa The Constitutional Court of South Africa is a supreme court, supreme constitutional court established by the Constitution of South Africa, and is the apex court in the South African judicial system, with general jurisdiction. The Court was fi ...

. Ngcukaitobi worked at the

Legal Resources Centre The Legal Resources Centre (LRC) is a human rights organisation based in South Africa with offices in Johannesburg (including a Constitutional Litigation Unit), Cape Town, Durban and Grahamstown. It was founded in 1979 by a group of prominent South ...

, a leading South African public interest law centre, first as a candidate attorney and later as Director of its Constitutional Litigation Unit.

Notable judgments

Apart from his well known role as an advocate, Ngcukaitobi is also an Acting Judge at the Land Claims Court of South Africa, with his notable work in that regard being th
Msiza case
He played a critical role in the removal of the Former President of South Africa

Jacob Zuma Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma (; born 12 April 1942) is a South African politician who served as the fourth president of South Africa from 2009 to 2018. He is also referred to by his initials JZ and clan name Msholozi, and was a former anti-aparth ...

by initially arguing in the Constitutional Court on th
Nkandla matter
that the Public Protector's remedial actions—that the President must pay back the money claimed to be for security upgrades—were binding. The implications of such an argument was that Zuma had broken his oath of office, a view which the Court ultimately held. In what became known a

in 2017, Ngcukaitobi argued that the Speaker of the National Assembly had a discretion to allow members of parliament to vote anonymously, in a bid to oust Zuma. Ngcukaitobi's 2021 judgment overturning the rape conviction of Loyiso Coko, ruling that by agreeing to oral sex the plaintiff had tacitly agreed to penetrative sex, was controversial drawing significant criticism from gender rights activists.

Education and Qualifications

Ngcukaitobi holds the degrees of BProc, LLB (Unitra), LLM (Rhodes) and LLM (London School of Economics). He was part of the international legal team that represented the major opposition political party in Zimbabwe after deadly elections. In 2019, he became a senior counsel after practising law as an advocate for only 8 years, an enormous achievement in light of the status typically obtained by older advocates given the 10 to 15 years minimum requirement.

References

1979 births Living people 21st-century South African lawyers {{SouthAfrica-law-bio-stub