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The Rhodesia Herald,
September 17, 1971
THE Government has accepted all the suggestions from women’s organisations for tightening up maintenance enforcement that could be implemented without causing considerable difficulties, the Minister of Justice, Law and Order, Mr Desmond Lardner-Burke, told the Senate yesterday.
Replying to the second reading debate on the Maintenance Bill, which was given an unopposed second reading, Mr Lardner-Burke told Senator Dr Oliver Robertson that to confiscate the passports of persistent maintenance defaulters would require a definition of a “persistent defaulter”.
“It might prevent husbands from taking up genuine job offers abroad when they had failed to find work in Rhodesia, and put a difficult burden upon the magistrate at BeitBridge, for example”, he said.
He asked whether passports could be impounded in respect of payments yet to come.
Wives could resort to law, using the existing measures to stop debtors absconding.
He told Senator George Fraser that the requirement of some kind of clearance before a divorced man could remarry could encourage people to live in a sin and be warned that women must protect themselves from men such as one in a recent case who had failed to pay maintenance to three successive wives.
Mr Lardner-Burke said he was most concerned with protecting the children.
The minister asked Senators to accept that the bill was an endeavour to improve the current position and to rest assured that further measures would be considered if suggestions were brought to his notice.
LESSONS FOR TODAY
- A summary of the Maintenance Act (5:09) of Zimbabwe 1971, says it seeks to “govern the law of maintenance . . . After all it is the legal obligation of both parents to support their children.”
- Maintenance is paid for children below the age of 18 years, or a person who is over the age of 18, but is not yet self-reliant or able to sustain themselves.
- Child maintenance covers the cost of the everyday care of the child, such as food, clothes and housing. Expenses such as school fees do not fall under child maintenance.
- Child maintenance remain very contentious, sometimes resulting in gender-based violence as some men are not willing to pay the maintenance fee.
- In a survey by The Herald in 2020, it was noted that a “number of women applying for maintenance for children in civil courts countrywide had declined 20 percent, a development legal experts and gender advocates believe is a direct result of paltry amounts being awarded that do not reflect the cost of living and so are not worth seeking.”
- Gender activists also attributed the decline to the growth of the informal employment sector, where establishing the income of the father was difficult for the courts.
Online Reporter