Last Friday, the department of justice and the Social Justice Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to have parents who default on child maintenance blacklisted.
This move aims to blacklist defaulters with credit bureaus, which would have a significant impact on their credit profiles and employment prospects. Readers of my column will know that I have written about this matter before, arguing that parents who default on child maintenance after a court order should be criminally charged and incarcerated.
A precedent was set by the Mahikeng high court in April 2023 when it sentenced a Mahikeng businessman to three months imprisonment for failing to pay maintenance for his three children after a divorce.
When news about the MOU between the department of justice and the Social Justice Foundation broke out, I shed a tear because, for me, this issue is both political and personal. In 2017, while pursuing my honours degree at Rhodes University in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), my mother lost her battle to metastatic cancer.
Her death compelled me to return to Gauteng to seek employment to take care of my family and specifically my younger brother, who had just started high school. Despite having an Ivy League-educated father who, at the time, was working as a senior executive at an international NGO, having previously been a senior executive at a government entity, my brother became my sole financial responsibility.
While the father was building guest houses in his hometown of Burgersdorp in the Eastern Cape and enjoying his middle-class existence in the suburb of Edenvale in Ekurhuleni, I was left to look after my younger brother without any financial or moral support.
His absence did not start with my mother’s death, though it was worsened after it. While my mother was still alive, the man would frustrate her to the point of legal intervention being needed. And even as he was given court orders compelling him to maintain his child, he would default within a few months. Statistically, 70% of parents in SA default on child maintenance in the first two years of the court order.
His defaulting implied that my unemployed mother struggled immeasurably to take care of my younger brother, relying on inconsistent consultancies and the generosity of friends. As a student, I was also compelled to work as a columnist for various publications to generate an income for both my upkeep at university and the upkeep of my family back home. I worked while studying so that my brother could go to good schools and have a decent life that wasn’t defined by childhood poverty.
The MOU will take some time to go into full effect as the state develops a system to facilitate it, and because the law does not work retrospectively, many of us who had to endure the horror of parents defaulting on child maintenance will never get justice. My brother is now a 21-year-old university student and by the time the MOU comes into full effect, he will likely be employed or running his own business. But many other women will never have to endure what some of us have had to.
Young siblings will not lose their childhoods being “deputy parents” as a result of absent fathers and mothers who are too busy working and too depressed to be fully present. Mothers will not have to spend sleepless nights crying, wondering where the next meal will come from, while the other parent enjoys a stress-free life with no regard for the consequences of their absence and unwillingness to provide financial support. This MOU is a victory, and I hope the state will act quickly to develop a system to facilitate it.
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