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SA's women leaders leave their sisters in the lurch
Rhoda Kadalie
August 10, 2006

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A247717

I AM as allergic to National Women’s Day as I am to male chauvinist pigs.

A day that has its origins in the noble Defiance Campaign of August 9 1956 is being desecrated by the consumer industry, which sees women as nothing more than the primary consumers of their goods, sexily draped around the latest 4x4. Accordingly, National Women’s Day has been transmogrified into Women’s Month for those of us who need more than a day to shop. True to form, our sisters in the African National Congress are launching yet another women’s movement, the Progressive Women’s Movement (PWM), in commemoration of its 50th Anniversary. The more the situation deteriorates for women, the more they think a broad alliance of organisations will do the trick. The moribund Gender Commission and the Office on the Status of Women have proven useless, but somehow the sisters think the PWM will do the trick.

It will work only if our sisters rise above party politics and prioritise women’s issues above their own sectional interests. On a number of occasions, women parliamentarians have acquiesced to being the gatekeepers of the most sexist policies espoused by the leadership of the party. Their silence around Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe’s tyrannical hold on power, Operation Remove Trash and its effects on women, the HIV pandemic, and the sexual harassment case of Norman Mashabane — to name only a few examples — speak volumes.

I have yet to be convinced that this movement will call the safety and security minister, the home affairs minister, the foreign affairs minister or the health minister to account for failing to implement policies and laws that affect women directly. All the rah-rah at the launch means nothing when women continue to be at the bottom of the scale in SA.

With 40% unemployment, the feminisation of poverty continues apace. With epidemic proportions of rape, sexual abuse, femicide and HIV, women bear the brunt of these scourges. The slow pace of delivery, the lack of sanitation, electricity and water delivery, cripple the livelihoods of women who remain the primary nurturers of their families, locked into overcrowded informal settlements and dismal rural areas. Our grand constitution means zilch to women who will never know what it means to be equal. Our public representatives have done nothing, absolutely nothing, for the plight of women in SA. In fact, so obsessed are they with their titles, that they forget they are public servants.

Two recent incidents reported in the media prove my point. Deputy Minerals and Energy Minister Lulu Xingwana turfed a business-class passenger out of her seat, simply because her flight bookings had been botched up. This violation was aided and abetted by South African Airways, who instead of telling the deputy minister that all passengers are equal, tried to make up for it by giving the affected passenger a travel voucher as compensation and relegated her to the back of the plane in a crew seat.

A second incident is more unsavoury. The City Press reported that Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka went shopping for furniture and her security guards allegedly demanded that the shop be closed as the lady in question wanted to shop in private. When the salesman refused, he was duly disciplined with a written warning. Of course, all of this was furiously denied in the paper but we now know who to believe. "Just who do these ministers think they are?" are the words on everybody’s lips?

Many of our sisters are an embarrassment to the memory and meaning of August 9 1956. The Defiance Campaign was the definitive demonstration against the laws that controlled the mobility of black women and reduced them to chattel and legal minors. Our female elected officials, who got into high office on the backs of those who marched, picketed and demonstrated against unjust laws since 1913, have forgotten the people who put them there. What we see are vain and self-aggrandising MPs bloated by their own self-importance, suffering from the chronic disease of entitlement.

The recent documentary by Special Assignment on the take-up of child support grants by schoolgirls who increasingly fall pregnant in order to qualify for the grant is one of the greatest indictments against our public representatives in Parliament. I listened with horror as young girls facetiously talked about why the child support grant was an incentive to fall pregnant. The consequences of unprotected sex, in the form of HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and babies, were not deterrents enough. The fearlessness with which these young women talked about sex as equal to being loved, as attention from young men, and never as a death sentence, indicated that government’s attempts at spreading the prevention message have failed spectacularly.

The young men were equally frightening. Sex meant access to any number of girls on their arms and in their beds. Condoms just spoilt the fun of having sex skin to skin. "One cannot enjoy sweets in a wrapper" — and so there seems to be no choice between pleasure and death. Early on in their lives, these young men have learnt the tricks of a patriarchal narcissism that predates colonialism, the consequences of which have become fatal for many young adults, particularly women.

While SA is being depopulated of its young women, our women ministers prance about as though we owe them. No Progressive Women’s Movement is going to save the young women of SA. If they really want to make a difference, they should start by holding themselves accountable first. Second, if they want to avoid hot air becoming the PWM trademark, and if they are serious about real transformation for women, I suggest they start implementing and monitoring the Human Rights Watch recommendations in the book, Violence Against Women in SA: State Response to Domestic Violence and Rape. That would be a good start — but it means shelving the rhetoric and knuckling down to some hard work.

*Kadalie is a human rights activist based in Cape Town.

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