New Assented Act blows away concubines

The new Succession Amendment Act recently assented to by President Tibuhaburwa Kaguta Yoweri Museveni, seems to have given men the license to sleep around with women and leave them upon death with nothing to share in their estate.

The Succession (Amendment) Act 2022 was assented to by the President on April 10, 2022. However, it has obviously given a huge blow to hopes of achieving fairness possibly by majority of Ugandans whose mothers, sisters and daughters stay in ilegitimate relationships not legally married.

The law, not only challenges the basic tenets of Uganda’s Constitution that treats all humans as being equal before the law, it has opened a can of worms in the feminist movement.

The new Succession Law stipulates that staying with a man for even fifty years is no longer a good case for a widow to line up for a share of the deceased’s estate.

In a rather controversial way, the law forbids an unmarried woman from claiming even a saucepan from her husband’s estate, even though it recognizes the children she bore with the deceased.

And for that reason, the children would be upon the demise of the father, entitled to a share from the seventy five percent of the estate set aside for the benefit of the orphans.

In another cruel provision, men (and may be women) who get convicted for evicting their partners from their matrimonial homes, can be jailed for up to seven years, or slapped with a fine of UGX3.3m or both.

Those partners who keep their relatives in their matrimonial home, the law confers benefits to them in case of demise to the tune of up to four percent of the seventy five percent of your husband’s wealth upon his demise.

The law entitles a legally married woman up to twenty percent of her husband’s wealth regardless of whether she had moved in with other men by the time of his demise.

The framers of the law, perhaps forget about the reality that even their own daughters and sisters are potential concubines or candidates of illegimate marriages.

Today dejected women stoop even as low as begging their spouses to at least carry out the simplest function of visiting their parents.

Unfortunately, the sense of unfairness and injustice isn’t restricted to the so-called illegitimate wives alone. There’s is something embedded right there inside this law which the officially married sisters, once they come to know about it ,would find unpalatable to chew.

The new amended Act gives green light to the widows to share equally the twenty percent share provided for them under the law. For the record, this excludes widows not officially married to the deceased as the case might be.