Traditional Courts bill full steam ahead despite public pressure to stop it

After a protracted parliamentary process, the contentious Traditional Courts Bill (TCB) is back on the agenda! This may have come as a surprise to anyone reading this weekend’s Sunday Times, which reported that the ANC Women’s League, opposition parties and a number of civil society groups appeared to have won their bid to stop the Traditional Court Bill in its tracks, at least for the time being.

The Sunday Times quotes ANC Chief Whip Stone Sizani as saying the ruling party had prioritised nine pieces of legislation to attend to in Parliament at the start of this year, prior to elections and that the controversial TCB was not one of them. Now before the National Council of Provinces (NCOP)’s Select Committee on Security and Constitutional Development, Tuesday’s briefing on the bill lasted all of about 10 minutes before the Committee scheduled a host of other meetings on the Traditional Courts Bill for the rest of the month.

After the briefing, gender activist Nomboniso Gasa was over heard in halls of parliament expressing her frustration to her colleagues that the Committee’s ANC MPs reported that the Free State supports the Traditional Courts bill despite the fact that public submissions are still occurring there. The Committee’s chairperson Mr Mofokeng is from the Free State. “How can the Free State members have a position when the public hearings are still under way there?” asked Gasa.

Gasa further claimed on twitter that during the TCB hearings in the Free State today a traditional leader allegedly barred certain people, assumed to be concerned about the bill’s implications for women’s rights, from participating. The main criticism levered against the TCB is that women are often not allowed to attend traditional courts and that the traditional system of justice excluded the right of appeal to a Magistrate's Court.

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