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By Anthony Mayunga
Political Platform Correspondent
Serengeti. Kigoma North MP Zitto Kabwe complained in the 6th Parliament session over the government’s failure to implement several directives from the House.The lawmaker should be informed that the governments and its organs also do not enforce most of the laws enacted in the very House.
Among the redundant statutes is the 1998 Sexual Offences Special Provisions Act, which, among others, prohibits conducting Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) to girls below the age of years.
FGM, as a result, continues unabated in areas, which embrace the infamous traditional practice such as Mara Region.
Sarah Mwanga, the director of Afnet, a non-governmental organisation also discouraging rampant domestic violence in the region, points an accusing finger at the government for lacking political will towards ending the practice once and for all.
“FGM is conducted in public and is accompanied by celebrations performed in the eyes of local government leaders, state organs, and politicians,” she wonders.
This happens in the backdrop of the Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda’s directive to the regional authorities to crackdown on perpetrators of the practice after the death of a 12-year old girl Mkami Bhoke last year, she says.
Rorya district commissioner Benedict Kitenga enumerates Suba and Nyancha as chronic wards for FGM in his jurisdiction area.
“The recent death of Mkami Bhoke should serve as a lesson to residents of the district for them to abolish the practice,” he suggests.
The Standard Two pupil at Irienyi Primary School died after her grandmother mutilated her genitals two days ahead of last year’s Christmas festival.
A parent or guardian, who is convicted of allowing his or her daughter’s genital organs to be cut, according to clause 169 (a) of the law, is liable to between a five and a 15-year imprisonment.
The convict can be required to pay Sh300,000 in fine and compensate for the injuries of the victim as directed by the court if he or she is not subjected to all penalties: the fine, compensation and the imprisonment.
Tanzania was the first East African country to enact the law, but unlike Uganda the government does not allocate sufficient funds required for enforcing it.
The Ugandan government deploys law enforcers to all FGM prone areas and provides activists with funds to operate in those areas.
The Political Platform’s investigation in Rorya District in the region indicates that most husbands have abandoned their wives, who are the victims of the outdated practice, allegedly for failing to satisfy them in bed.
The husbands marry other women, who have not been affected by FGM, leaving their divorced wives facing economic hardships along with children.
Monica Lucas, 35, is a mother of four children residing at Ikoma Village in the district and an FGM victim. She blames her parents for her divorce.
“My husband said before he abandoned me and the children that he wished his concubine’s sexual organ was mine,” she recalls as she sobs.
She was 13 years old when her parents had summoned her from Home Bay Primary School in Kenya only to realise that all preparations were made for her genitals to be mutilated.
Her schoolmates were surprised to note some of her private parts were chopped off, thinking she was different from them.
“As if the FGM shock was insufficient, my parents forced me to be married to a man, who was working with the Tanzania Revenue Authority, when I was Form One. I was still virgin by then,” she adds as she continues sobbing.
Her husband never returned after he was transferred to Kigoma Municipality. “I had to trace him only to see him already married to another woman,” she regrets.
The husband, however, had reluctantly rented a house for her, but he did not frequently visit her on grounds that his first wife did not satisfy him in bed due to the FGM scar.
Monica says she could not understand the meaning of his complaints or feel the difference in bed, as she was virgin before her genitals were brutally cut.
She finally agreed to return to her home village along with her children, leaving her husband with his second wife until he succumbed to HIV and Aids in 2009.
Bertha Nyango, 36, who is also a resident of the village with six children, says she had her genitals mutilated in 1985 shortly after she returned to the village from Dodoma where she was pursuing her primary education.
“I was forced into the traditional practice in 1986 to pave the way for my marriage in April the following year,” she remembers.
But her husband had abandoned her shortly thereafter on grounds that his first wife did not satisfy him in bed.
Her husband barely takes care of the children, as he spends most of his time with his second wife and her children.
Bernard Mission, an official with a Christian Council of Tanzania (CCT) project aimed at discouraging domestic violence in the disttrict, admits that the majority of husbands in the village had abandoned their wives as a result of the FGM ractice. “Husbands desert their wives once they come across women whose genitals have
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