Charles Simengwa
20 August 2007
Ndola — "I BOW down to the services of the Roman Catholic church paralegal programme that has benefited my life greatly and has saved me from early death," she started the story of her life in an interview in Luanshya recently.
Her life was more than a ruin when Margaret Chanda Nkonde lost her husband of 21 years.
The year was 2000 and she was 48 years old.
It had been a long road blighted in many parts by the couple's childlessness.
Mrs Nkonde recalls how the husband's family had tried on many occasions to push her out of what was deemed a fruitless marriage.
More inglorious moments for her were to come after Mr Nkonde's death, when his family insisted the widow was not entitled to any portion of his estate since she had not "given him" any children.
The theoretical standpoint of the family was that she could not fail to have children in more than two decades, unless, of course, she had been flirting with other men.
To accusations that she was responsible for her husband's death, through her perceived promiscuity, was added to Mrs Nkonde's bewilderment when she learnt that she was not going to get a single penny from her husband's terminal benefits.
Until she was introduced to the paralegal programme of the Roman Catholic Church, she had formed a fragile alliance with the future, unsure of who she was and what was to become of her life if she were forced out of her matrimonial house, a threat that had been communicated to her.
Now at 55, and with two houses pinned to her name, besides the accompanying benefits of wise investment, Mrs Nkonde is full of praise for the paralegal advisers, particularly Aaron Chinyimba, the district coordinator for Luanshya, Mpongwe and Masaiti, who helped her sidestep the unfair treatment.
Many other women and children are accessing the services that are daily helping to change their living situations.
Women and children are the two focal groups of the programme.
Men too are "victims of circumstances" and have been carried on the wings of the programme.
Except for criminal matters, the paralegal advisers embrace different types of civil cases.
A less obvious but possibly more debilitating problem is the inability of many people in lower income ranks to seek legal aid.
In such a state of affairs it is arguable whether a community could be said to respect justice.
Background
As conflict analysis is the systematic study of the profile, causes, actors, and dynamics of conflict, it is necessary to first delve into a brief background of Luanshya.
A conflict profile provides a brief characterisation of the context within which the intervention would be situated.
Luanshya lies about 35 kilometres south-west of Ndola, the provincial headquarters of the Copperbelt Province.
Some available records show that by the end of 2003 the town had an estimated population of 155,000 people.
As long back as independent Zambia's history goes, Luanshya's economic activities, for the larger part, rested on the back of the mining industry.
Following the privatisation exercise of the 1990s, things fell apart for many residents.
Privatisation is still the fabled monster among the locals; it is widely blamed for the drastically changed living standards since it was the hastily conducted exercise that resulted in many people being jobless.
Poverty in less than a decade of offloading the local mine into private hands lay behind the glittering facade of what once was known as the garden town of the Copperbelt.
The mask of economic stagnation is slowly falling away but the marks of desolation are still visible.
Only recently, district administrator, George Kapu, told some sections of the media that unemployment had risen to 'irksome' levels.
He blamed it all on company shutdowns.
The number of people engaged by the new mine investor is a bare fraction of the mass that hinged on the former Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines, and theirs mostly are contractual jobs.
The basic needs basket for Luanshya published by the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection for the month of June indicated that a family of six needed K965, 250 on both essential food and non-food items.
That is far beyond the reach of many residents.
There is also a history of struggling employers such as the municipal council that by January 2004 had not paid its employees for 10 odd months, a situation that prompted a strike.
An inarguable fact is that poverty and conflicts are good bedfellows.
It is worth noting that the many social and economic evils in which Luanshya is still hemmed and gravitate towards girls and women.
Children are expectedly at the receiving end of the collapsed living standards.
As could be expected of a place whose means of livelihood have been squeezed out, families fast disintegrated.
Quite many children saw the last of stable family structures in the 1990s.
It was also during the lean years that the fewer men still in employment, or those who could afford to, littered Luanshya with non-marital children, or children born out of wedlock.
But what is the paralegal programme about?
Paralegal advisers
The paralegal programme is a component of the Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace (CCJDP).
It falls under the governance master programme alongside Jubilee Zambia, Justice and Peace, Economic Justice and Peace, and the Parliamentary Liaison programme.
On the Copperbelt the paralegal programme is found in Luanshya, which also covers for Mpongwe and Masaiti, and in Kitwe, whose office is responsible for Kalulushi, Lufwanyama, Chambishi and Chibuluma.
The Chingola office extends its services to Chililabombwe while Mufulira is a stand-alone.
Ndola is the head office on the Copperbelt and caters for part of Masaiti district.
Paralegal advisers and volunteers undergo a two-week intensive training programme. The components of the course are introduction to paralegal work and its ethics, democracy, the law of torts, the law of contracts, family law, police powers and the rights of suspects in criminal matters.
Others are criminal law and procedure, the law of testate and intestate succession, constitutional law, employment law, the law of social security, the Bill of Rights, and Zambia's legal system.
From the time the programme was introduced seven years ago, some trainers have included the Zambia Institute of Advanced Legal Education in Lusaka, the University of Zambia, National Legal Aid Clinic for Women, Law Association of Zambia, and the CCJDP.
Many people have been trained and they include police officers, priests, teachers, and traditional rulers.
Apart from those trained to run the established centres, others are trained as a way of building their capacity to handle various cases as well as equipping them with peacebuilding and conflict transformation skills.
As a good example, traditional rulers handle different cases such as child maintenance, land and marital disputes.
Therefore, training in paralegal work is important for them.
Between the year 2000 and 2005 over 300 paralegal personnel were trained.
In order to ensure the programme runs to the expectations of legal aid seekers, paralegal personnel are guided by a set of ethics, the primary one being confidentiality. For that reason, only clients whose permission was sought could have their names and cases published, as was the case with Mrs Nkonde who wants other women in a similar position to learn from her experience.
As the services offered are free of charge, nobody is expected to solicit for favours in the same way that there must never be personal or emotional engagements or relationships with clients.
Accountability and trustworthiness form the cornerstone of the programme, especially where monetary transactions are involved, such as in child support cases.
A paralegal adviser should also lead by example.
Sincerity of character is the key to inspiring those seeking legal advice.
Against such a background, paralegal advisers have been able to pursue many cases to logical conclusions, as Mrs Nkonde testified during the interview that was conducted in the presence of a representative of United Kingdom-based Comic Relief, the major financial supporters of the paralegal programme.
Apart from the pressure that was being foisted on her by some relatives of her late husband, the Luanshya local court made an outlandish ruling on terminal benefits.
The decision was only reversed with the help of the paralegal office.
Mr Nkonde was a miner at the time of his death and the court ruled that since he had not written a will, his parents would receive 50 per cent of his money, the widow would get 20 per cent, and all the dependants were entitled to 10 per cent.
It was also interesting that the court said the estate administrator must receive 20 per cent of the deceased's earnings "for all the expenses incurred during and after the funeral, and to pay water and electricity bills."
Well, the decision was challenged because in cases where one dies without writing a will it is only the surviving spouse, children, parents of a deceased person and registered dependants who are entitled to terminal benefits; others are simply 'intruders' and must be treated as such.
The Intestate Succession Act, Chapter 59 of the laws of Zambia provides, among other things, for the vesting of the matrimonial house in the children and surviving spouse of a deceased person, in the case where one dies without a will in place.
Whereas the children's interest in the matrimonial house is absolute, the surviving spouse only has interest in the house as long as he or she does not remarry.
These and many others are the lessons legal advice seekers are given at the paralegal office.
After a protracted legal battle Mrs Nkonde managed to get what was rightfully hers. From the K17 million she was finally given, she was able to buy another house and is currently engaged in projects that have generally cushioned her life.
As a confidence-instilling measure, legal advice seekers are encouraged to practise good record keeping.
Mrs Nkonde is a good example of people whose well-kept records saved them from the imminent danger of perpetual poverty.
The people fighting over her husband's estate could have taken advantage of her had she not been guarded by the records such as the council rental cards some of which were issued in the 1980s, long before anybody ever imagined the houses could be sold to the sitting tenants.
There are a lot more other cases the paralegal office handles.
Nature of cases
The paralegal programme must be a sound idea, which explains why the services offered have caught on and grown steadily in the last seven years.
The Luanshya office is swamped with a laundry list of different problems.
Daily averages of 20 cases are handled by the office and they cut across gender. Monthly statistics show that close to 300 cases are recorded, as was the case in June this year when 293 complainants were attended to.
Infidelity and poverty have made a number of men desert their families although some women are also known to have abandoned their husbands for "greener pastures".
According to Mr Chinyimba, desertion heightened when the former miners received their money and some have never been seen back in their homes, especially after they suffered financial ruin at the hands of their concubines.
For those who did return home they have been venting their frustrations on their spouses, as some cases reported to the paralegal office could prove.
During the over one month that this author spent at the paralegal office at Kafubu House in the town centre, it is safe to conclude that there are many illegitimate children.
Young, desperate mothers daily flock to the office with a steady supply of complaints about how their former lovers have neglected their children.
Some had driven themselves into fatalistic resignation about their misery until, at the urging of either their friends or families, they sought the paralegal services.
Their lives could now be said to be brighter after the men who fathered their children were summoned and made to account for their offspring.
In Zambia there exists the Law of Affiliation and Maintenance of Children Act Number 5 of 1995, which provides for the maintenance of children.
A child under this Act is a person below the age of 18 years, whether a marital or non-marital child.
It is clear that the wayward fathers summoned to the office are mostly ignorant about this law just like their former girlfriends are also in the dark and suffer alone because of ignorance.
Through the paralegal office they have found relief in that the fathers of their children commit themselves to monthly maintenance costs as agreed by the involved parties.
If a man refuses to comply with a written agreement in case of a non-marital child, a woman is advised to take the matter to the court of law.
The court will first make an affiliation order before it makes an order for maintenance.
An affiliation order, according to the National Legal Aid Clinic for Women's newsletter of January to December 2006, is an order declaring a man to be the father of the child identified in the order.
Cases of child maintenance top the list of complaints, but there are many others that people are grappling with.
Marital problems are a prominent part of the local communities in Luanshya. Interestingly, even some police officers are brutalising their spouses.
Labour disputes also rank highly and this is one service offered by the paralegal office from which men have benefitted a lot.
From the nature of labour matters that are reported to the office, one could easily tell that many people are ignorant about the Employment Act.
The scarcity of employment has meant that some desperate job seekers do not bother to sign contracts upon recruitment until their services have been terminated and they are left in the cold.
There are growing fights over the council and mine houses that were sold through a presidential decree in the 1990s.
Some families are in disagreement over who should be in charge of their houses, but it is the widows who seem to be at the wrong end of the broom.
Paralegal advisers sometimes have had to swiftly obtain caveats from the local authority to prevent widows' houses from being sold without their knowledge, more so that some relatives of their deceased spouses are clinging to title deeds.
Benefits
Overall, however, the paralegal programme is drawing large numbers of legal advice seekers, if the daily statistics are anything to go by.
A side benefit of the programme is that people have a chance to have their problems solved while they are also sensitised on their rights and pieces of legislation relevant to their problems.
For married couples in conflicts, they have an opportunity to be reconciled as one of the goals of the programme is to improve human relations after a problem.
The problem-solving structure is also less complicated than the courts of law that may favourable to some, especially the under-exposed.
The programme has enjoyed a good relationship with partners such as the Victim Support Unit (VSU) in the Zambia Police Service and the Legal Resources Foundation (LRF).
Male clients grappling with labour-related matters and need legal representation are referred to the LRF while the VSU has also provided a good interchange of ideas on quite many cases.
The programme has a long-standing relationship with the Young Women's Christian Association in terms of case referrals.
The National Legal Aid Clinic for Women is used by the paralegal advisers on matters that the programme has limited knowledge on, but chiefly for legal representation for women who cannot afford legal fees.
According to the Copperbelt paralegal programme coordinator, Patricia Nkandu: "In some districts we have good coordination with the Labour Office in that we refer cases to one another. We also have briefings as a way of updating the programme on new labour laws."
Mrs Nkandu admits that there had been some misunderstandings in the past before the role of the programme was appreciated.
Some lawyers who frowned upon it relaxed after the objectives of the programme were clearly spelt out, and paralegal advisers now do consult some lawyers at no cost.
There are some challenges though.
Challenges
The programme revolves around an army of volunteers who are largely incapacitated by lack of money.
It has become increasingly difficult to follow up cases.
Office accommodation and furniture are scarce just like communication is hugely hampered by lack of telephones.
An application for space at the Roan parliamentary office has not yielded any positive results.
As a result, the office at Kafubu House is clogged with cases most of which could be attended to at other centres.
The scarcity of resources has also meant that outlying areas in Mpongwe and Masaiti are deprived of the much-needed services.
A less conspicuous problem is the threat of risks on the lives of paralegal advisers. Not all the disputants are happy with the outcome of their cases and they direct their anger at the advisers.
However, from where this author stands, the challenges faced by the paralegal advisers are put in the shade by the wider benefits that have reached the local communities.
As it is widely acknowledged that not many people could afford legal fees, the programme has demonstrated that third party intervention or alternative dispute resolution outside the ambit of the established court system is a route worth taking.
Apart from the services being absolutely free, there is a fair chance of cases being resolved faster.
Another significant feature of the programme is that it cuts across church denominations.
As Mrs Nkandu puts it: "the paralegal programme has been embraced more than we expected when it was launched in 2000."
(The author is a student at Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation in Kitwe, studying Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation, a Pan-African Diploma programme)
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