Cape Town – The contentious Traditional Courts Bill (TCB) will on Tuesday come before the National Council of Provinces’(NCOP) select committee for security and constitutional development. According to a report on FeministsSA the Bill is to be discussed clause by clause at the committee despite the fact that the process stalled in November 2012. The TCB, when first gazetted, prompted an overwhelming number of public submissions on the Bill. Twenty out of the 22 organisations who made submissions on the Bill called for its withdrawal from Parliament, claiming it was unconstitutional. According to Director of Rural Women’s Action Research (RWAR) Dr Aninka Claassens the Bill appearing before the NCOP on Tuesday is effectively the same Bill which was introduced to the National Assembly in 2008. “This Bill’s substantial content and the procedure followed in its drafting are beyond repair. In spite of its many flaws, the ANC seems intent on ramming it through. One can only assume that it aims to please traditional leaders in the run-up to the election next year. But this is a false promise, as this Bill will not stand up to constitutional scrutiny,” FeministsSA quoted her as saying. “In the face of the storm of protest that the Bill elicited, both President Jacob Zuma and Minister Jeff Radebe made far-reaching concessions about inherent problems and the need for major changes over a year ago. Yet it is the flawed original version that is once again before the NCOP,” she added. “Pushing the Bill through would be a slap in the face of the many rural communities that have gone to great lengths to attend the public hearings and who have opposed the Bill consistently since 2008,” Senior Researcher at RAWR, Dr Mbongiseni Buthelezi told FeministsSA. General criticism of the Bill was that it would exacerbate abuses in rural areas by providing chiefs with autocratic power, allowing chiefs to override accountability measures in place in indigenous rural cultures. In public hearings on the bill people from rural communities complained of abuses by chiefs in their areas. These included the extortion of tribal taxes and excessive fines, women being treated with derision, the banning of community meetings, the sale of community land and high-handed chiefs engaged in corrupt mining deals, wrote Claassen in a Mail & Guardian op-ed last year.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 09:47:15 +0000
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