Why voter registration..?

My National  Identity card (Omang card) has my unique ID number, which identifies me in the National database of Botswana. Furthermore, my birth date is recorded on the card. The law requires me to carry my Omang card at all times. We are told that in a democracy like ours, every person above the age of 18 years is entitled to vote.  Therefore the moment a day of elections is chosen; all valid-to-vote Omang cards can be calculated and announced to election monitors and the public at large.

Having established “which” Omang cards will be valid on Election Day, the only thing remaining to make the Omang card the Election card, is the place where the bearer MAY vote. But does that really matter if the computers (and election administrators of all parties) RECORD the ID of everyone who goes into the voting booth? No one can vote twice, by changing voting places, because even if they tried, their name and number will show more than once in the voting list and their vote will therefore be rejected by both the computer and the election administrators. In other words, bussing of voters will be futile; because those bussed will be merely reducing their numbers wherever they came from, and there at putting themselves at a disadvantage.

Thus using the Omang card as the sole voting document will result in a next-five-years snapshot of who voted where, such that participants in any in-term by-elections will be easily identified, should their MP or councillor die during term. The Omang database is readily available in Government computers. The whole expensive exercise of “registering” voters is therefore an unnecessary and time-wasting duplication of effort.

Some may argue that a person from Shakawe in the north-west corner of the country, should not be allowed to vote in Mochudi , in the south-east extremity of the country, and determine who will be MP or councillor in the latter area; something that my scheme of things described above would permit! Such an argument does not hold water, considering that a person from Shakawe may relocate to live in Mochudi any day and any time, without need for anyone’s permission or knowledge, for that matter. As things stand today, even with the requirement for “voter registration” in place, a person from Shakawe can relocate to Mochudi just a day prior to registration, and still register and vote in Mochudi , anyway.

So, why register voters at all? I ask you.      

On social breakdowns...

Early this year I read from one of the newspapers that the Chief Justice, Maruping Dibotelo had said that eleven million Pula (P11m) of child maintenance money lay uncollected from the courts by the babies’ mothers. That’s about one and a half million US dollars (US $1.5 m). The money had been paid to the courts by the babies’ fathers. At around the same time it was reported that unwed fathers complain that their babies’ mothers deny them access to their own babies. Last week I read about a priest who allegedly battered his wife to death with a hammer, then surrendered himself to the Police. Yesterday I read Iqbal Erahim’s religious piece in the WeekendPost, complaining bitterly about divorces and the resultant social breakdown.

All these speak volumes about the breakdown of society in general. But let me try and open up my confused mind on some of these “problems”. The first question I ask myself is: Where do the courts keep the P11 million? If it is in banks, why can’t the unwed mothers collect the monies direct from the banks, rather than from the courts? This will in no way increase the administrative burden on the courts, because the fathers will deposit the monies into the mothers’ bank accounts, and then submit the evidence of such deposits to the courts for filling. The mothers will only interact with the courts if their accounts have not been credited for a specific month. It seems to me that this will actually lessen the administrative load on the courts.

Should unwed fathers be allowed access to their babies? Here we need to go back to the IKalanga basics. In Kalanga it is the exception, rather than the rule, that two young unwed people engage in sex. When it happens though, a child is usually born. This child, like all other children born in wedlock, is entitled to a home and a family. If its biological parents cannot, for whatever reason, marry each other, then the child will either belong to the mother’s family, or be “wed” by the father, and belong to the father’s family. Yes, in Kalanga tradition a child is wed by its father in exactly the same way that its mother would be, except that there is no sex between father and child. The mother’s family “gives the child away” to the father, and the father pays a dowry (malobolo). This does not imply barring the mother from further access to the child. It simply means that if the mother should get married to another man, “adoption” of the child by the other man will be proscribed. Indeed the biological father, to whom the child will have been “married”, will have the option to take his child to his family, on the child’s mother getting married to another man.

The baby’s mother’s family cannot refuse to “give a child away in marriage” to its biological father, if the father has paid “damages” for impregnating their daughter, and if the father is mentally stable and economically capable of rendering a good upbringing to his child. The issue of mothers “barring” fathers from access to their children therefore falls away as such fathers would simply take away their “wed” children to their own (fathers’) families. The right of a father to “marry” his child is not absolute, though. If society should determine that the child’s father does not want to marry the child’s mother for no other reason than that he has someone else in mind to marry, then society (the courts) can refuse to let the father “marry” his child.

 In view of the above I do not believe that unwed fathers who have not “married” their children should have a right of access to their children, whether or not they pay child maintenance for such children.

What about “same-sex” marriages? For a start I DO believe that what goes on in anyone’s bedroom between two people is nobody else’s business but their own.  Equally, I DO believe that those two people should NOT make their relationship my business, either by demanding that I declare them to be married or that I recognize them to be so married. I believe that where there is no possibility of a child being born, marriage makes no sense at all. Where there is a possibility, but fertility issues intervene, marriage can and should be conducted. Child adoption should then complete the process.

People who decide to live with sexual partners of the same sex as themselves should be eligible to individually “marry” children from the state, the same way that Kalanga fathers “marry” their own biological children from the would-be in-laws  But since these would not be their own children, such people should be put under stricter scrutiny by the state or by whosoever gives them their child to adopt. The state should then proffer a tax rebate/exemption to such a parent on the basis of her/his having “married” a child, and not on the basis of her/his having  “married” a same-sex partner.