•Women in villages may not know their rights because of a lack of newspapers and community radio stations. Picture by HUMPHREY NKONDE

By HUMPHREY NKONDE –

THE mud brick ramshackle of a 70-year-old woman in Ndola’s Chipulukusu Township looked like it would fall apart as it rained heavily, while food and charcoal were in short supply.
At least the old woman’s accommodation problem was solved when Habitat for Humanity built her a more habitable house.
She hoped to put food on her table (reed mat literally and strictly speaking) when she was selected to be one of the actors in a local television  drama series.
She made a name in Chipulukusu,dubbed the ‘Zambian Hollywood’ but the unfortunate part was that she was not paid for her role in the drama series.
Meanwhile, a Zambian man resident in Ndola applied some ‘xenophobia’ on his former Zimbabwean wife when he transferred the custody of their four-year-old daughter to his parents following the dissolution of marriage.
It is alleged that the Zambian man used to mistreat her, leading to the dissolution of the marriage.
After the two were divorced, the Zimbabwean woman found herself in another problem, as her former husband decided to transfer the custody of their four-year-old daughter to his parents who are resident in Lusaka.
These and many cases involving women have been handled by the Ndola branch of the National Legal Aid Clinic for Women (NLACW) under the umbrella of the Law Association of Zambia (LAZ).
NCLAW’s mission is to have a Zambian society where underprivileged women and children have fair and equal access to legal rights through legal representation.
The fees charged by the legal clinic are modest so that the underprivileged women and children are not denied justice.
“Depending on the circumstances of the client, we sometimes waive the fees or reduce them,” said Mr Zaccheaus Musonda, acting senior advocate at NCLACW’s Ndola branch.
Mr Musonda said he was recently in Chavuma District in the North-Western Province where he discovered that girls under the age of 16 were being married off when the law was clear that this was illegal.
It is illegal to marry a girl less than the age of 16 and consent to sex is no defence at all because under-age girls are protected by the law.
“We asked a police officer in Chavuma who works near the border with Angola about early marriages and he told us that it was normal in that society for a girl less than the age of 16 to get married,” Mr Musonda said.
It is expected that people in Chavuma may not be aware that it is illegal to marry girls under the age of 16 because of a lack of media presence.
The public media, which comprises national newspapers like the Times of Zambia and Zambia Daily Mail are not in circulation and information cannot be properly disseminated due to lack of community radio stations coupled with high levels of illiteracy.
Mr Musonda said early marriages were common in Chavuma partly because of rural poverty, a contributing factor to girls leaving school at a tender age.
A research conducted by the Zambian Insight Media Group found that early marriages were connected to  the high rate of divorce cases.
For instance, the company’s research found that a Lusaka man recently impregnated a girl in Matero Township after he got her an I-pad through which he used to send messages on Facebook.
He sought divorce from his wife on the pretext that she did not want to keep his relatives and ended up marrying the young girl, a former maid whom his wife chased after it was established that he gave her money from which she acquired the I-pad, clothes, a suitcase, lotion, a wrist watch and a mirror.
Some people close to the case suspect love portion because when the girl left home she had not been paid her dues and when she wanted to take the housewife to court,the man decided to settle the bill by paying the young girl more than twice the amount she was entitled to.
Mr Musonda said that the women’s legal clinic had been handling several divorce cases lately because women and men alike had become unfaithful in marriages.
“When marriages are dissolved parties come back again to us regarding sharing of matrimonial property,” the legal practitioner said.
“Women come to us because they are mostly disadvantaged in property sharing after dissolution of marriages.”
One drawback in handling some civil cases is that lawyers like Mr Musonda are not allowed to argue cases before the Local courts, which use unwritten customary law to deal with  these matters.
“Most of the cases we handle which involve women start in local courts,” Mr Musonda said.
“But we ask our clients to respect the decisions from there and when need arises we ask them to appeal to a high court.”
Another issue that can originate from women being divorced is child custody, a specific example being the battle between the Zambian man and his former Zimbabwean wife over the care of their four-year-old daughter.
Misplacement of children can lead to other social problems such as defilement, one of the criminal offences the legal system is grappling with.
At the time of authoring this article, the legal clinic in Ndola was offering psycho-social counselling to a six-year-old girl who had been defiled by an old man.
NWACL is not only mandated to take up cases involving women and children in court, but also offers psycho-social counselling as well as marital counselling.
In most of the cases the media is concerned with just covering the arrest and jailing of sex offenders, but reports on where victims, their parents or guardians can obtain psycho-social counselling is not normally covered.
Defilement and rape can leave indelible psychological scars on girls and women, the reason why psycho-social counselling is necessary in such matters.
As some cases against young girls, women and children border on criminal justice, the women’s legal clinic in Ndola works hand-in-hand with a police officer from the Victim Support Unit (VSU).
Mr Musonda is of the view that the law should be amended so that magistrates are allowed to send perpetrators of sexual offences for longer periods in prison as a way of decongesting cases before the High Court.
At the moment, when a magistrate feels that the convict has to go to prison for a longer period than he or she is mandated by law, cases are  referred to the High Court for sentencing.
While the NLACW has helped to solve problems relating to girls, women and children, another drawback is that it does not have offices in all the districts.
It is for this reason that NLACW has embarked on out-reach programmes to teach women and girls on their legal rights.
In fact, it was through the outreach programmes that it was discovered that Chavuma was grappling with cases of early marriages.
Other outreach programmes offered by the legal clinic are teaching young girls and women about HIV/AIDS.
NWACL has been raising awareness through the media – Radio Chengelo – mostly used on the Copperbelt and there are plans to do more programmes on the Ndola-based Sun FM.
NLACW, which also distributes information in the form of brochures, was established in 1990 under Act No.47 Chapter 31 of the laws of Zambia as a project under LAZ’s Women’s Rights Committee.
The office has three offices, one in Ndola on Mapanza Road near Broadway which caters for towns on the Copperbelt, Luapula, Northern and North-Western provinces.
While the Lusaka office  is located on Plot No. 110a/150 in Villa Elizabetha, Musonda Ngosa Road covers Lusaka and towns in  Eastern and Central provinces.
Towns in Southern and Western provinces are administered by the Livingstone office located in Suite 4-7 at Warner House on Akapelwa Street.
-Zambian Insight Feature Syndication