South Africa?s local government elections: women s...
South Africa?s local government elections: women still far from ?holding up half the sky?
Date: January 1, 1970
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The local government elections taking place in South Africa in March are one of the first test cases for the often glaring gap between the grandstanding of leaders at regional events and what actually happens on the ground. As leader of the African National Congress (ANC) President Thabo Mbeki will not have to hang its head in shame. But other parties have some serious soul searching to do, and as head of state Mbeki will need to ask what can be done to bridge the gap between his party and all the rest.
When they met in Gaborone last August, heads of state of the Southern African Development Community pledged to make sure that women are equally represented in all areas of decision-making in line with an African Union position.
The local government elections taking place in South Africa in March are one of the first test cases for the often glaring gap between the grandstanding of leaders at regional events and what actually happens on the ground.
As leader of the African National Congress (ANC) President Thabo Mbeki will not have to hang its head in shame. But other parties have some serious soul searching to do, and as head of state Mbeki will need to ask what can be done to bridge the gap between his party and all the rest.
There is a Chinese saying that women hold up half the sky. Where gender equality in decision-making is concerned the ANC can deservedly claim to be shouldering more than its fare share of the responsibility.
A few facts and statistics illustrate the point. Local elections in South Africa are contested on the basis of both “ward” or constituency seats and the Proportional Representation (PR) or the “list” system.
Across the globe, women tend to perform better in the PR system where voters vote for a party, rather than an individual, and parties decide who will represent them by putting forward a list of candidates in order of preference. As long as women are high up and or evenly distributed on the list, they stand a good chance of getting in.
In the first local elections in 1995, women comprised 28 percent of those who won on the list system but only 11 percent of the ward councillors, for an overall total of 19 percent women. This went up to 38 percent women in the list system and 17 percent in the ward seats, for an overall total of 29 percent women in the 2000 elections.
Under pressure from gender activists, the Municipal Structures Act of 1998 “encourages” but does not oblige political parties to ensure that half of all party candidates on their lists are women. The act is silent on the ward seats.
The big achievement of the ANC in the 2006 elections has been not only to exceed the 50 percent target for women on its list (in which it has a total of 53 percent women) but to substantially increase the proportion of women ward candidates to 40 percent of the total ANC ward candidates.
Although the latter falls short of the 50 percent target, the achievement is significant because ward seats are regarded as “superior” and therefore more highly contested by male candidates. Recent reports of backlash from potential ANC male candidates are an indicator of the internal struggles that the ANC has had to fight to achieve this target.
Overall, when ANC women ward and list candidates are put together, they constitute 48 percent, or just short of half, of the total ANC candidates.
The same cannot be said for the other 96 parties contesting the elections who have apparently not been swayed by the winds of change regionally or by the nudging of local legislation. According to figures supplied by the Independent Electoral Commission, all told women candidates constitute 35 percent of the total in the 2006 local elections; up a mere one percent from 2000.
Two outcomes are clear even before the elections are even held. First, since it is unlikely that the ANC will win all the seats or that those seats won by opposition parties will be predominantly held by women, South Africa will not achieve the SADC or AU target of 50 percent women.
Second, to the extent there is any improvement on the current figure of 29 percent women in local government, it will largely be because of women candidates fielded by the ANC who constitute one third of all women candidates (despite the party being one out of 97 parties contesting the elections).
This raises some key issues for the future. For a start, the skew state of affairs in which only one party is pulling its weight will strengthen the hand of activists who have been arguing that it is not good enough to leave a constitutional imperative like gender equality to the whim of political parties.
The failure of the polite “encouragement” by the Municipal Structures Act to prompt action by other parties even with regard to their lists (let alone their ward priorities) will be used as a strong argument to go for stronger legislative provisions. These will be equally resisted by opposition parties who argue that obliging parties to field women candidates is a violation of free choice.
Here two important rights will clash: the right to associate freely, on the one hand, and the right to gender equality: a “cornerstone” of the constitution, on the other. Legal minds will remind us that no rights are absolute; that rights have to be balanced and that in the end some rights may be more equal than others.
Apart from healing the rifts that have occurred as a result of the ANC’s bold internal decision to prize gender equality over the rights of individuals in some instances, the party and its leaders will also have some soul searching to do.
For example, does the ANC believe strongly enough in gender equality to be willing to spearhead stronger legislative provisions for women’s representation in decision-making at the risk of the outcry this will spark from the opposition? And will the party exercise the same boldness within its own ranks to ensure gender parity in the national and provincial elections in 2008 in which women also still only constitute about a third of the total?
Ultimately, will South African women ever genuinely hold up half the sky, and how will the whole nation pull together to ensure that they do?
Colleen Lowe Morna is executive director, and Susan Tolmay researcher and publications manager, at Gender Links. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.
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