Nomboniso Nangu Maqubela: Champion of rights in the new SA
1968-2017
NOMBONISO Nangu Maqubela, who has died in Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape at the age of 48, was a civil rights activist who empowered marginalised communities around the country by teaching them about their rights and arranging practical measures for their enforcement.
She revived a national network of community advice offices which was on the verge of collapse 10 years into South Africa’s democracy, after international donors withdrew their funding.
The advice offices were formed under apartheid mainly to help activists and their families access rights and assistance after being detained.
The offices worked closely with Lawyers for Human Rights and the Legal Resources Centre.
In spite of the withdrawal of international funding, they continued to provide human rights-related services to marginalised communities. Nangu Maqubela realised they needed them as badly as ever.
She ensured that the advice offices educated people about their rights. Typically these were farm tenants vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. They’d be thrown off farms where they had worked and lived for years, and left destitute and homeless.
Nangu Maqubela’s community advice offices arranged legal representation for them.
The advice offices also came to the rescue of mineworkers, many of whom didn’t know how to claim for their pensions, or even, she found, that they were entitled to pensions.
She arranged for the advice offices to be linked to university law clinics and got them to take on these and other cases.
She found people in rural areas with no access to government services. Thanks largely to her, they now go to their nearest community advice office which helps them to apply for ID books, social grants and child grants.
They provided labour-related advice and credit-related advice for people who are at the mercy of unscrupulous creditors.
They handled cases of illegal deductions from grant recipients’ accounts. The first place to which pensioners went when they realised that more money was being deducted than they had bargained on was to Nangu Maqubela’s network of community advice offices.
They started reporting these cases, which the Black Sash then highlighted at a national level.
When in 2005 the advice offices were close to collapse because of the withdrawal of international funding, the Black Sash and other NGOs began an initiative to save them, which led to the formation of the National Alliance for the Development of Community Advice Offices.
Nangu Maqubela, who was closely involved in the initiative, became PRINCIPLED: Nomboniso Nangu Maqubela fought to ensure that paralegals could remain independent the director.
She was also active in efforts to improve access to justice in other African countries. She was part of the group that fought for inclusion of access to justice in the UN’s sustainable development goals after they’d been ignored in the millennium development goals.
Through that initiative she got involved in the Open Government Partnership in South Africa and fought to have the institutionalisation of advice offices included in the country action plan for South Africa.
Nadcao was the only civil society organisation included in the country action plan, largely through Nangu Maqubela’s persistence. President Jacob Zuma boasted about it at the UN and exhorted other countries to follow the example of South Africa.
But Nangu Maqubela was the one who drove the process, which may not have happened without her.
She worked closely and tirelessly with the advice offices. She linked them up with NGOs which could support them, and mobilised critical funding to keep them going.
She championed the mainstreaming of gender issues within the advice offices, and the need to educate paralegals to help the offices provide a more effective service to communities.
She was instrumental in the formation of the Dullah Omar school for paralegals, which was opened in 2014. She was also instrumental in ensuring the inclusion of community-based paralegals in the Legal Practice Bill, and in the establishment of the Legal Practice Council.
Nangu Maqubela died of malaria, which she contracted in Malawi, where she was involved in an initiative to establish an African “centre of excellence” for access to social justice.
Her aim for the centre, to be based in Johannesburg, was to promote the role of paralegals, which she realised was hugely important for people with no access to the legal system.
She engaged with lawyers, judges and academics, and worked closely with the legal aid board to make this happen.
She steered clear of politics where she could. But she was adamant that the state should not take over the advice offices. Only by maintaining their independence could they properly represent the interests of communities, she believed.
She opposed attempts by the Department of Justice to hire “her” paralegals.
She felt this would compromise their role of conflict mediation in rural communities.
Nevertheless, she was careful not to alienate the state. She knew that private funders could never shoulder the full burden of keeping the advice offices going. She needed the state and never allowed herself to forget it.
Nangu Maqubela was born in Mdantsane township outside East London on August 11 1968.
Her parents divorced when she was young and she was raised by her grandmother while her mother worked as a domestic worker in East London.
The poverty and want that she experienced when growing up made her acutely sensitive to the needs of poor rural people, and inspired in her a lifelong passion for social justice.
Although she was academically bright there was no money for university. She worked at the Eastern Cape Socioeconomic Consultative Council and Eastern Cape Development Corporation, which exposed her to civil society work.
She was a member of the council of the University of Fort Hare.
She is survived by three children. — Chris Barron
Zuma boasted about it at the UN . . . But Nangu Maqubela drove the process