By Nondumiso Sibanda

ANOTHER week has passed and another non-governmental organisation (NGO) is busy writing a proposal.
Yes writing a proposal dear friends or responding to a call for proposals.
This week is an introduction to a three-week analysis of the marriage laws in Zimbabwe and the ongoing debate that is long standing between the Registrar General’s office and NGOs.
I am of course being patriotic and understanding the confusion and dissentions that come with NGOs. I am on the side of the Registrar General’s office and will do an expose of the issues in detail in the weeks to come.
The challenge that we are faced with as a nation when it comes to NGOs is that they are busy going where the money is and they do not even bother to understand the real issues that communities are facing.
They do not even take time to understand the priorities of a community and the cultural heritage that a community has.
Instead what we see now is a picture of NGOs coming in and trying to change everything that is taking place in a community and calling their way of living wrong just because they have a pot of funding somewhere which states that they should have so and so outcomes at the end of the project.
Communities are not people in the eyes of NGOs.
They are simply outcomes and targets that they must reach in order to receive more and more funding.
I shudder when I think of how many lives are lied to all in the name of receiving funding.
I was laughing with some colleagues just the other day when I discovered that there was a call by some Scandinavian donor, to have organisations apply to receive some bicycles in Africa.
Apparently these bicycles are meant to be used in projects in rural areas for entrepreneurial purposes.
The NGO is supposed to come up with such a proposal.
This donor has bought already thousands of bicycles for Africa.
I laughed my lungs out.
The reason why I laughed was because already such a project is not coming from the community.
Who said that rural folk need bicycles for their projects?
In Zimbabwe as an example, maybe what is needed in farming communities are ploughs, cattle, seeds, irrigation systems and so forth.
Yet someone in a Scandinavian country decides that we need bicycles for our projects.
Ok, assuming we do need bicycles, what if we need them for easier travel and it is not linked whatsoever to entrepreneurship?
This is when you find NGOs coming in with their big cars and telling us that we need as a community to come up with projects that need bicycles even when we do not need them.
This forces a community to refocus its priorities and try to make something foreign fit into their way of life rather than have their way of life impact and decide on the kind of project that any NGO should be coming to do in their community.
That is the very foundation of community ownership of projects.
You cannot claim that a community owns a project because you forced it down their throats to suit the project that was proposed to you by the donor.
With this in mind, it is sad to say that when it comes to the marriage laws in Zimbabwe, which is currently the same predicament we are finding ourselves in.
The history of marriage laws is such that we currently have three types of unions; the registered customary union, the unregistered customary union and the civil marriage.
The reason why we now have all these types of marriages is because of the effect of colonialism.
One can even tell by the title ‘civil marriage’, which of course refers to the contractual bit, but can also be read in-between the lines to mean, the right marriage.
The ‘unbarbaric’ marriage!
I am sure you are wondering what this has to do with the NGOs, but I tell you that it has everything to do with them.
As usual they are always following the money trail.
For where the wind goes, they will definitely follow and this time I assure you it is the wrong way.
Donors have been pushing to have all these marriages harmonised for different reasons and in my opinion it is so that we can be more ‘civilised’ and this call is eating away at our very fabric as African societies who in the end will have no legacy whatsoever, but that of the Western nations.
The project is not from Zimbabwe.
It is from donors who are further dividing us and are looking at our practices as unethical.
In next week’s article I will take you to where it all began and how we are now at a point where our children cannot inherit anything because of the psycho bubble of these NGOs.
We need ideas by Zimbabweans, for Zimbabweans not Western notions that come in to eat away at our very fabric as society.