Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Notes from a GBV conference at GIBS, and the money scripts we inherit long before we ever say “I do”.

I was at GIBS last week or two weeks ago,  for a Gender-Based Violence and Femicide conference. The panel was Kensi Nobanda and Dave Crewe-Brown, with Sylvester Chauke, in, I have to say, an excellent pair of socks,  moderating a fireside chat. One of the sessions was on financial abuse: the kind of harm that leaves no bruise, no case number, and almost no public conversation.
Sylvester opened with two stories.

The first was a post he had come across on X: the claim that no one who covers 100% of the bills, however generous the framing, is incapable of using that generosity as leverage. “Even if they are the saints.” He scrolled through the replies. Most people agreed. The line that kept surfacing was blunt: money is a tool for control.

The second story came from Niq Mhlongo’s novel The City Is Mine. Mangi and his fiancée Aza live together in Linden, Johannesburg. Mangi pays the rent for eight years. Then, cleaning one day, he finds an envelope that reveals what Aza never told him,  she is the landlord. He has been paying her, on her own property, for the better part of a decade. When he loses his job soon after, the relationship collapses. Aza ends it. Mangi ends up on the street.
Was that financial abuse  or just financial wisdom and self-protection? The room did not say..

That discomfort is the point. We know how to recognise a slap, a punch, and blood.  We are far less fluent at recognising the sentence that precedes it: it is my money, so I make the rules.

The Statistic Nobody Quotes
Kensi made the observation that reframed the whole session for me: financial abuse features in an estimated 99% of GBV cases, and it is very often the reason survivors stay,. not love, not denial, but arithmetic. You cannot leave a house you cannot afford. You cannot leave a bank account you were never allowed to see.
In South Africa, our GBV conversation is heavily weighted toward the physical  and understandably so, given our femicide, filicide, zoosadism and  androcide numbers. But we rarely name the other architecture of power and control: virtuous verbal violence, normative righteous venting, hostile silence, and money used deliberately as a leash. These phrases will be familiar to more households than we’d like to admit:

Phrases of Financial Control
“It is my money, so I make the rules.”
“You do not need to know about our bank accounts.”
“I earn the paycheck, so you ask me for permission.”
“Your name does not need to be on the deed.”
“Kukwam apha. Kushaya esam isiginci.”  in this house, my instrument is the one that plays.
“I am the only one who wakes up at 4am to go to work. My voice is the last word.”

Each of those sentences sounds, on the surface, like a boundary. Some of them even sound like responsibility. But listen for what they actually establish: absolute, unilateral authority over every financial decision in the house. That is not stewardship. That is control wearing the costume of provision.

A Tool To Name It
Nedbank has built a survey called #HowFreeAreYou, designed to help people recognise the early signs of financial abuse and coercive control in a relationship,.before those signs harden into dependency. It asks the quiet questions: do you need permission to buy groceries, top up airtime, or put petrol in your own car? Is your income controlled by someone else? Do you feel trapped by another person’s financial restrictions?
Take the #HowFreeAreYou survey →

There is a companion tool worth a look tool,  the NedFinHealth Monitor, which rates your general budgeting, saving, and debt management, independent of any relationship context.
NedFinHealth Monitor →

The Scripts We Never Chose
Here is what the research adds to the conference floor: couples don’t fight about money because of arithmetic. They fight about it because of psychology. Financial disagreements are among the strongest predictors of divorce, largely because money is never just money,  it is a proxy for power, security, and love, all at once.
The financial psychologist Dr Brad Klontz calls the underlying beliefs Money Scripts, subconscious rules, absorbed long before adulthood, that quietly run our financial behaviour:

The Four Money Scripts
Money Avoidance — money is associated with greed or anxiety; avoiders ignore statements or sabotage their own success.
Money Worship — the belief that more money solves everything; worshippers overwork or overspend chasing it.
Money Status — self-worth pegged to net worth; status-seekers buy visibility rather than security.
Money Vigilance — high alertness and frugality; the vigilant rarely spend, fearing ruin even when it isn’t near.

Most couples are running two different scripts without ever having named either one. And the data on what that produces is not gentle. Roughly 50% of adults admit to hiding a purchase, an account, or a debt from a partner,  a breach of trust that behaves, psychologically, much like an emotional affair. Financial opposites frequently marry each other,  the spender and the saver,  which reads as complementary at first and becomes a fault line later. And the higher earner, often without meaning to, subconsciously claims more of the decision-making power, leaving the lower earner feeling managed rather than partnered. Financial arguments, the research also shows, last longer and turn harsher than almost any other category of marital conflict. That should tell you something: they are rarely actually about the number on the statement.

Five Ways To Close the Gap
None of this is solved with a stricter spreadsheet. It’s solved with emotional alignment,. knowing what you each inherited before you try to merge it.

Five Steps to Align Financial Psychology
1. Share your money histories — how your own parents handled money, and what that taught you before you could name it.
2. Identify your scripts — say out loud whether you’re an avoider, a worshipper, a status-seeker, or vigilant.
3. Set a no-permission threshold — agree a rand amount below which no purchase requires a conversation.
4. Schedule financial dates — monthly, starting with dreams before you touch the bills.
5. Run a hybrid system — shared accounts for shared costs, separate accounts for personal freedom.

The Ledger That Isn’t Kept
One more thing the session left me with, and it belongs in this conversation even though no GDP figure will ever carry it: the care economy that never makes it onto any balance sheet. Childcare. Eldercare. Cooking. Cleaning. Emotional labour. Household management. None of it is counted in national accounts, and almost all of it is still disproportionately carried by women,.unpaid, and therefore invisible to exactly the financial systems we’re asking people to be “free” within.
Unpaid care does not sit outside the paid economy. It intersects with it, subsidises it, and is rarely acknowledged by it. Any honest account of financial abuse has to hold that intersection too,  not just who controls the bank account, but who is quietly absorbing the labour that makes the bank account possible in the first place.

Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu, Even Here
I keep returning to Sylvester’s two opening stories. The X post insists that whoever pays 100% of the bill can never be trusted not to weaponise it. Mangi’s story, from The City Is Mine, complicates that,. Aza’s silence about the deed reads to some as protection and to others as control, and both readings are defensible, which is exactly why the conversation matters.

What isn’t up for debate is the underlying principle. A relationship,. like a community,  only holds together when power is shared, not hoarded. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu: a person is a person through other people. That includes financial personhood. A partner who cannot see the account, question a decision, or say no to a purchase without asking permission first is not being provided for. They are being administered.

Naming financial abuse for what it is, not “his money sense,” not “her financial wisdom,” but a pattern of control,  is the first act of accountability. Take the survey. Have the conversation your parents never had with you. And the next time you hear “it is my money, so I make the rules,” ask, gently, whose house that rule was actually built for.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts- Intellectual Musings.

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..