It has been pointed out that the women constitutionally-mandated to be elected to parliament by the House of Assembly have still not been elected (HERE). Sections 86 and 95 require that if a certain number of women have not been elected to parliament, then the elected (not appointed) Members of the House (MHA) “shall on their first meeting” nominate between 3-5 women from each of the four regions. Ten days after this, the whole House of Assembly is to meet and vote for one woman from each region. The most curious part of the whole business is that the first nomination stage undertaken by the elected MPs is to take place “at the instance of the Chairman of the Elections & Boundaries Commission.”
Before you wonder aloud why a 21st Century Constitution would use the suffix –man after Chair-, it seems to me that the really curious part is that the role of the Chairman seems to be unexplained. Can the elected MPs not have “their first meeting” until the Chairman says so?
Whatever the true meaning, the press and the public seems to be deferring to the Chairman and not to the elected MPs, who might have conceivably sat themselves as an electoral college and requested (or even ordered) that the Chairman attend to document the nominations. But that has not happened, and so it is that two years into a five-year term, parliament is still sitting unconstitutionally.
And perhaps this means that all acts done by parliament are unconstitutional, as Women & Law in Southern Africa Swaziland Director, Ms Lomcebo Dlamini, has argued?
Whether this is so, it could explain the lack of women-friendly initiatives by the Swazi parliament and government. I have argued earlier that the parliament has not done enough for women (HERE). In addition to the various requirements for equality and protection, the 2005 Constitution also provides in s 34 that “[p]arliament shall, as soon as reasonably practicable after the commencement of this Constitution, enact legislation” to ensure a “surviving spouse is entitled to a reasonable provision out of the estate of the other spouse whether the other spouse died having made a valid will or not and whether the spouses were married by civil or customary rites.”
For those who don’t know Swaziland, this provision is aimed at remedying the difficult position many women find themselves in due to messy polygamous situations here.
Whatever the phrase “as soon as reasonably practicable after the commencement of this Constitution,” it must surely envisage a time frame less than 5 years?
