Kenneth Mokgatlhe
Burkina Faso’s late popular revolutionary and president, Captain Thomas Isidore Sankara, said that women were important in any revolution: “The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or because of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the triumph of the revolution. Women hold up the other half of the sky.”
The ANC’s recent choice of leadership contestants is a vote against women’s emancipation. This upcoming conference is nothing but an endorsement summit to further entrench patriarchy in South Africa, using the ANC as the vehicle because of its dominant influence in our mainstream politics.
The ruling party, the ANC, is going to its internal party elections which will elect their preferred people to lead the ANC’s upper structure, the national executive committee, entrusted to be the higher decision-maker in between the conferences. What is not new, however, is the fact that there are no indications to have equal gender representation in South Africa’s oldest party – women are nowhere to be found.
The ANC’s nomination list does not inspire confidence, even before going into the conference, because it does not do anything new. We are going to see neither women nor youth represented in the ANC’s upper structure. We should call a spade a spade. The ANC’s empty rhetoric of women or youth empowerment has been all talk and no action since 1994.
It is certain that we are going to have Cyril Ramaphosa as the president while Paul Mashatile will deputise him after the conference that is set to take place in less than a month in Gauteng. The only position where we might see a woman occupying a position within the party’s top six is the deputy secretary-general position, a less powerful because the elected person will act only in the absence of the secretary-general, which might not happen for the entire term of office.
According to Statistics South Africa, Census 2022, “despite women making up just over half of the population, they remain relatively unrepresented in positions of authority and power. This is recognised by South Africa’s Constitution, which sets out gender equality as a founding principle. The Women Empowerment and Gender Equality Bill in particular calls for 50 percent representativity in decision-making positions.”
Only three out of nine provinces are led by women as their premiers – Free State, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal. Although in 2019 women had achieved 50% women representation in Parliament, it is not enough because men are occupying powerful political, social and economic standing.
Patriarchy is not only the ANC’s problem, all other parties are also suffering from that disease. Most political parties represented in Parliament are men; mayors and Speakers throughout the country are men; the military and police service are dominated by males; and business and other strategic sectors are dominated by older, sometimes white, males. Women still have a long way to go.
The ANC has done little in terms of grooming youth and women leadership within its organisation, as have other parties.
We have seen how the late Zanele Magwaza-Msibi was denied an opportunity to lead the IFP, simply because she was a woman and therefore not probable to lead conservative men who do not think that women will ever lead men.
The EFF, the third-largest party in the country, has also not done well in terms of placing women in powerful positions. Some small parties are even worse because they do not even have a single woman in their top six. This should be changed or challenged by women.
*Kenneth Mokgatlhe is an independent writer and social commentator.