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Today In History |
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On September 9, 1908
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Orville Wright makes 1st 1-hr airplane flight, Fort Myer, Va
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SWAZILAND: Lack of legal status hinders the progress of women |
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 MBABANE, 18 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - Swazi businesswomen say the floundering
national economy will benefit from their entrepreneurial talents when
they are no longer constrained by discriminatory laws.
Gender
rights activists in Swaziland often use the story of businesswoman
Thandi Khumalo to illustrate the personal and economic devastation that
can result from Swazi women's lack of legal status as adults in
traditional law.
"She was robbed of everything she owned because, by Swazi custom, she
was a minor. Her male relatives cheated her of everything she had
earned as a brilliant businesswoman. That is why we are placing our
hopes on the new national constitution, which is supposed to guarantee
equality for women," said Cynthia Khumalo, Thandi's niece and a
businesswoman in the central commercial city of Manzini.
Thandi
had built a four-bedroom home in the suburb of Fairview on the hills
overlooking Manzini, where it was the largest structure at the time,
and financed it with the profits from apartment blocks she had
developed and various other enterprises.
Returning to Swaziland
from a trip abroad, Thandi found she was locked out of her house. The
new owner explained that her husband had forfeited the property to pay
off a gambling debt.
The house had been registered in her
husband's name as, by law, a Swazi woman cannot own property; without
the sponsorship of a male relative, neither can she enter into a
contract or secure a bank loan.
"My aunt loved that house. She died of heart failure a short time later," said Cynthia.
A
woman attorney in Manzini commented, "As modern educated women, we feel
it's insulting that we need a document to tell us we are adults. But
the lending institutions require this [male sponsorship]. In
retrospect, it is remarkable that women who occupied cabinet positions
and government posts these past years could sign government documents."
According to the new constitution, which was signed by King
Mswati recently and will come into force in January 2006, women are to
shed their status as legal minors and be granted all the privileges of
legal adults: "women have the right to equal treatment with men and
that right shall include equal opportunities in political, economic and
social activities".
The Swaziland chapter of Women and Law in
Southern Africa have interpreted this to mean that banks could no
longer refuse loans based on gender.
"Except for some die-hard
male traditionalists, most Swazis want equality for women because of
the clear economic and social benefits. Banks are out to make money -
they don't like having to turn down profitable customers and not earn
interest through loans because of out-dated views on women," said
Constance Ndlovu, co-owner of a beauty shop in Matsapha Industrial
Estate outside Manzini.
Banks loans have been unavailable to
women as individuals - they had to form a corporation with other
partners, which then became the legal entity receiving the loan.
"Women
have always been able to own property in towns if they formed
corporations, but this is an expensive and time-consuming process,"
said Manzini attorney Fikile Mthembu, who was the city's first woman
mayor.
Swazi businesswomen are planning to use their new
constitutional rights to obtain loans from financial institutions, and
to press the government's Land Control Board into granting them title
deeds to urban plots, previously reserved for Swazi men.
"Swazi
Nation Land remains a question - we don't know if women will be
successful in obtaining farm land under chiefs," said one attorney.
Eighty
percent of the population live as smallholder farmers on communal Swazi
Nation Land, administered by palace-appointed chiefs. By custom, every
Swazi male head of a household who pledged to be the subject of a chief
was entitled to a place to build a house for his family, a small field
to cultivate subsistence crops, and grazing land for his cattle.
That
privilege has not been extended to women. Under the "kuteka" custom,
when a woman's husband died she was required to move into the household
of her brother-in-law, become his wife and bear his children in a
polygamous relationship. The deceased man's family acquired all his
property; in some cases, families denied widows and their children any
of the late husband's property, leaving them destitute.
Women's
groups were successful in getting the constitution's authors to address
this problem in a section devoted to the property rights of spouses: "a
surviving spouse is entitled to a reasonable provision out of the
estate of the other spouse, whether the other spouse made a valid will
or not, or whether the spouses were married by civil or customary
rites".
A widow will no longer have to enter into a "kuteka"
arrangement with a brother-in-law. The constitution states that "a
woman shall not be compelled to undergo or uphold any custom to which
she is in conscience opposed".
Matsapha beautician Ndlovu said,
"These things are now written down in black and white, and the king has
signed this constitution. There is no going back." |
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