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RIGHTS: Help Is On the Way to Assist Swaziland’s Elderly Financially

James Hall

MBABANE, Apr 14 2005 (IPS) - Gogo (granny) Dube, a small but spry white-haired woman of 67, has had to raise five grandchildren since her daughter and son-in-law, the children’s parents, died of AIDS-related illnesses within months of each other in 2000.

‘’This is not the way my life should have happened. It is a tragedy when a parent outlives her children. It is sad when children have to grow up without parents. I’m all my grandchildren have. But it is a struggle. No money. Little food,” she related.

Dube spoke from the stoop of a mud and thatch house on the edge of a vacant, windswept field not far from the Swazi capital Mbabane. Winter is approaching in the Southern Hemisphere, and she recalled how particularly cold last winter seemed because of the sometimes empty stomachs she and her grandchildren endured.

‘’What can you do when there is no food? The children cry, and you give them water to drink to fill their bellies. But this sometimes makes the pain worse,” she said.

Dube gets no help from her husband, a 75-year-old retired school headmaster. In a country where polygamy is legal, her husband has had two other wives. One passed away. He lives with the younger wife, and the children he has with her, in another farm further south. Dube has not seen him in two years.

‘’Swazi men and their wives used to live together on the same farm. The wives and children supported each other. It was a good system. Now this custom has broken down. It is no longer polygamy. It seems like the men are practicing bigamy, with separate wives living here and there,” she said.

But at least help is on the way, in modest form from a new government initiative to help Swaziland’s elderly financially, and through other interventions of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

‘’We have lost track of the elderly in our country, because all our attention has been focused on sexually-active age groups with AIDS, and their infected or orphaned children,” said social worker Thandi Gama.

Deputy Prime Minister Albert Shabangu told IPS, ‘’Elders are revered in our culture. We must see to their needs because our older citizens are facing a situation they never expected. At this time in their lives, they had believed they could relax after a life of hard work. Instead, many grandparents have to raise young children all over again. This is after their own children have died of AIDS.”

Shabangu said that the elderly have little money or resources to return to parenting. They may lack good health, and in the absence of aid from their deceased children, they struggle to support themselves, with little hope of finding the means to clothe and school a new generation.

Financial help will be doled out to Dube and other destitute elderly Swazis under a new government scheme that sets aside about 5 million dollars in the first programme in the country’s history expressly aimed at the elderly.

‘’Our elders have always been taken care of by their families. This represents a significant shift in society, when government has to step in with a large spending programme like this,” said social worker Gama.

The money set aside for the programme in this year’s government budget is relatively small, leading social welfare officials to look to other ways to assist the elderly.

One way is mutual assistance projects and co-operative schemes, mostly involving women of all ages but including the elderly.

A report prepared by the Secretariat of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), noted, ‘’Among the majority of rural and low-income urban dwellers, women perform all domestic tasks, while many also farm and trade. They are responsible for the care of children, the sick and the elderly, in addition to performing essential social functions within their communities. Many rural and urban women belong to women-only mutual-aid societies, cooperatives and market women’s groups.”

Such organisations allow women to pool combine their monetary and labour resources to cultivate fields, produce commercial products, and create savings accounts.

Throughout Africa, such ventures can be found in Cameroon’s Corn Mill societies, where women grow maize and grind it for meal sold at markets, and the ‘’Six S” cooperative associations of Burkina Faso, which are involved in a number of money earning schemes and assist elderly women with aid and support groups.

Another one is the General Union of Cooperatives in Mozambique, which is credited with supplying most of the fruits and vegetables sold in the capital Maputo.

In Benin, an estimated 8 percent of rural women belong to formal cooperatives, but 90 percent participate in women’s savings and credit groups.

Women’s credit associations in Ghana, Tanzania, Gambia and Zimbabwe are used by 25 percent of economically active women in the non-agricultural informal sector, and the money these societies invest in businesses and farms bring returns to help the elderly group members.

Throughout Southern Africa, governments and NGOs have come to realise that the elderly can be dramatically assisted by relieving them of the burden of caring for grandchildren.

In Zambia, government and NGOs have combined with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to promote economic empowerment for elderly-headed and other households in need through programmes, training and income-generating activities, so that families who have taken in orphans are better equipped to handle the increased economic burden.

In Malawi, the international developmental organisation World Vision has helped residents of the rural Nthondo community to build ten child-care centres. These centres relieve the burden of the children’s elderly caregivers by providing food and quality time away from home devoted to educational and sports activities that give hours a day of welcomed respite for grandparents.

In Swaziland, Swazis for Positive Living (SWAPOL), founded by five HIV-positive women, uses the profits from its agricultural cooperative to assist not only AIDS orphans but also grandmothers like Dube who take care of them.

‘’If not for these grannies, our AIDS orphans would all be out on the streets of urban centres, begging and in some cases dying of exposure and malnutrition. As a nation in crisis, we owe a debt to these grannies, and we must assist them whenever we can,” said SWAPOL founder Sempiwe Hlope.