Politics

6 August 2001

National Gender Summit, Braamfontein

I start by contextualising my presentation in terms of the debates of the women’s movement in establishing the institutions for gender equality in our country. The debate occurred in the context that our country was taking the first steps forward from an apartheid, patriarchal and capitalist past towards a new democracy in 1994. It was committing itself to building nonracialism, nonsexism, and to eradicating the legacy of the poverty and violence that women experience.

The challenge for the women’s movement was how were we going to engage with the State for the first time in our herstory. A state that, even after elections and a new Constitution, was that it was deeply patriarchal. How would we ensure political power and political will, as opposed to dependence on political patronage and goodwill?

The "machinery" was motivated to ensure that all of society: government, Parliament, civil society, business, labour, religion, media, households etc begin to dismantle the patriarchal power of fear and hate, of the hierarchies of inclusion of exclusion of invisibilities and of silence. In the new global language that the women’s movement started adopting "to mainstream" gender equality. To engage with these institutions required that all in these new structures have the courage to use their power in the interest of the poorest women to advance their cause again and again, maintaining focus and equilibrium, even when the patriarchy insulted, derogated, dismissed or attempted to make invisible or marginal. How to ensure the women’s movement never became reduced to simply ululating our patriarchs, either male or female.

One of the critical factors that the women’s movement did not fully engage with, was the reality of becoming part of a global economy - a global politics, based on profit in which the poor have become poorer and the rich have become richer, in which violence against women and the poor has increased, in which there is growing militarisation and the strengthening of the global arms industry, in which fundamentalisms of all kinds have thrived. The question of the extent to which our new democratic state would conform or not would have major implications for the feminist agenda of the women’s movement of transforming the lives of the poorest women and transforming gendered roles and responsibilities.

This is the context in which I share the experience and the challenges that face the Joint Monitoring Committee on the Improvement of the Quality of Life and Status of Women as part of the national machinery targeting Parliament as a potential site of power and transformation.

The Parliamentary Committee was established towards the latter part of 1996 and included members of the National Assembly and of the National Council of Provinces. Our brief was to monitor Government’s implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw) and the Beijing Platform for Action. This brief effectively required the committee to monitor the work of every single department in relation to meeting the objectives of gender equality and equity. When we began we were an Ad Hoc committee without our own budget. Since we became a permanent committee at the end of 1998 we have our own budget, but like the budgets of other committees, it is fairly limited. Last year, our budget was R150 000. The committee had its own researcher for only one year of its existence. In terms of administrative support we are allocated one committee clerk and the chairperson is allocated a secretary.

Whilst attempting to change the resource allocations of Parliament, the challenge is to use the power given to us as a parliamentary committee by the Constitution and the Rules of Parliament, to ensure we are not rendered powerless. This has come from understanding that we do have an important source of power, that our power also comes from within us, and collectively, in combination with all those in our committee and the many millions of women in rural and urban areas who voted for democracy and members ofParliament as their public representatives, in the hopes that their lives would change.

What have we done and what are we doing?
The committee decided that our focus had to be the poorest women, particularly rural women. We decided that the central focus of the committee was to change the laws so that women would have rights in the workplace, in their homes and in their country. In early 1998, after extensive consultation with NGOs, the committee drew up a list of priorities. Most, if not all of these laws were not on Parliament’s schedule for 1998 or 1999. They included the Domestic Violence Act, the Maintenance Act, the Customary Law on Marriages Act to address the minority status of many African women affected by this. Our priorites also included ensuring that the Sexual harassment code was incorporated into the Labour Relations Act, changes to the Employment Equity Act, the Skills Development Act, the Equality legislation, as well as ensuring that the Job Summit targeted employment creation for women.

About 80% of the legislative changes the committee prioritised were brought into the parliamentary schedule over the next two years and were enacted by the end of 1999, thanks, largely, to the work that the committee did, not just in Parliament, but together with the CGE, the OSW, and the many, many NGOs around our country.

Within Parliament, how did the committee ensure that these priorities became the priorities, amidst many other competing priorities for Parliament and for Cabinet? We sent our priorities to the President, the Deputy President, every Minister and Deputy Minister and to the Chairpersons of every parliamentary committee. The ANC study group of the committee motivated for a meeting of the ANC Women’s Caucus which included Ministers such as Manto and the Speakers Frene and Baleka, at which the priorities were endorsed. It was taken to the ANC Governance Committee and was raised in a meeting with the Deputy President. Those were very important steps in terms of ensuring that those priorities were prioritised by Cabinet and by Parliament.

The challenge since last year has been to follow up on those priorites which we identified and which are not yet in place. To work closely with you to ensure that the Customary Law on Inheritance and Succession reflects what rural women want and need, that the Sexual Offences Law closes all the current loopholes through which rapists escape, that the laws that we have passed, such as the Domestic Violence Act and the Maintenance Act and the Equality legislation are resourced properly and implemented effectively, and that all existing discriminatory legislation still on the statute books is removed.

We need to move to the point where all legislation, whether on land or trade and industry, that goes to Cabinet, and that includes the Budget, Minister Pahad, includes a memorandum explaining how it integrates a gender perspective in its formulation.

The Budget: If we want to identify the priorities of any institution, government, business, labour, international organisations: follow the money. It tells you what is being prioritised, who is being prioritised, who is valued and what is valued. The committee took a number of steps in relation to that. We engaged with the Finance ministry on the need to engender macroeconomic policy and the Budget. The committee attended the Medium-term Expenditure Framework Conference (MTEF Conference) at which the framework was being shaped and conceptualised. We did a presentation in the plenary on Gender, Macroeconomic policy and the Budget. We have worked in partnership with NGOs through the Women’s Budget Initiative in developing the analysis of every department’s budget and the budgets of some of local governments and donor funding.

We held hearings in Parliament to which the CGE, the Women’s National Coalition, the Women’s Development Bank, Sangoco etc came and presented. We held a workshop in Parliament to which we brought Dianne Elson, a major feminist economist and Rhonda Sharpe, who had been doing work internationally, to present to parliamentarians and we got the Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Finance (now Deputy Minister of Finance) to be the discussant. The committee went as part of a delegation to the Commonwealth Ministers meeting and motivated for a pilot for South Africa and the culmination of all this collective work is that the National Budget Review in 1998-99 committed itself for the first time to beginning to engender the entire Budget. To look at the impact of all income and expenditure in terms of women’s realities both as the majority of the poorest and in terms of women’s gendered roles.

An example of what this entailed is the Working for Water Project. It committed itself to ensuring that over 50% of all jobs created should go to women, that over 60% of these should be in rural areas and that arrangements for flexitime should be explored to enable single parents to participate. Of the 40 000 jobs created in the first quarter of 1998, 20 000 went to women. Of course, the questions of training, sustainability etc are critical but this reflected an important start.

The gender analysis done of different programmes in the 1998-99 National Budget Review was a victory for women. Last year that exercise was no longer in the national Budget. This year that exercise is no longer in the national Budget. I am glad that the Minister is here today and I am sure that he will be able to support all of us in ensuring that gender budgeting is brought back into the national Budget, because it is about improving the lives of the poorest women in our country.

This year the committee held workshops in rural areas in the poorest provinces in our country. We had a workshop two weeks ago where we brought 200 women to Parliament, mainly from rural areas, to look at the participation of women in the lawmaking process. We will be having hearings on poverty, HIV/Aids and violence. These are the priorities that the committee has established and on which we will be holding hearings from September to the end of October.

I want to refer to some of the challenges that I think we all face as the movement for gender equality in our country today. Yesterday Zanele Mbeki referred to a "powerhouse" and I think it was a very significant reflection. The question she raised is that we have women in very powerful places all across our country today. So why is it that women today continue to bear the brunt of poverty, HIV/Aids and violence (as reflected in both the Presidential Report on Poverty and the Stats SA reports)? How do we build sisterhood and solidarity guided by Cabral’s "Tell no lies, claim no easy victories."?

One of the key challenges facing women operating in a party-political system is how to ensure that women do not vote against the majority of poor women by voting with their parties against the laws aimed at changing women’s access to the rights in respect of land, health, labour laws etc.

In our hearings and interaction with ministries and in their recent Budget speeches those ministries that are critical for addressing poverty and violence against women, such as Health, Justice, Safety and Security, Housing, Social Development and Education, almost every single minister said they do not have sufficient funds to be able to do all the things we are asking them to do to break the cycles of poverty and violence women’s lives.

In 1996 at the National Government Conference of Commitments, our Government, through the Beijing Platform for Action commitments, committed itself to reducing military expenditure and re-allocating to women’s empowerment in recognition of the fact that women form the majority of the poorest. In Government’s Conference of Commitments to the BPFA in 1996 the chairperson of the committee asked the following question, and I quote: " We must ask departments to put their money where their mouths are, to take away spending in defense on corvettes which cost R434 million each, submarines which cost R1,1 billion each and generals who cost R464 638,00 each per year."

In the Budget debate on Defence and Intelligence in 1995 Joe Nhlanhla, Minister of Intelligence was quoted as saying, and I quote: "The greatest future threats to the South African people are poverty, unemployment, homelessness and inadequate health services. There is no forseeable external military threat as far as South Africa is concerned. A realistic threat analysis may thus allow a democratic State to reallocate resources from the security establishment to socio-economic development." ANC policy, as reflected in the White Paper and the Defence Review reiterated this understanding.

The committee’s Cedaw report of 1998 says, and I quote: "In relation to the Budget one of the key Government commitments in the Beijing Platform for Action in 1996 was to decrease and reallocate military spending to support women’s economic advancement. If this commitment had been given effect, the resources to address poverty, HIV/Aids and Violence would be able to make a major impact to save many lives. At present, South Africa is finalising agreement of R30 billion in relation to Defence when the Defence White Paper itself notes that the major threats crippling our nation’s nascent democracy are poverty and crime and not an outside threat to the Republic. This is just one glaring example of the reprioritisation that needs to happen within and across departments."

What is the implication of the estimated R50 billion for South Africa’s debt and the Budget deficit that was quoted in argument against the increased social spending that was needed for real reconstruction and development after apartheid?

The question I want to leave all of us with is: What is the role of an independent movement for gender equality, an independent women’s movement supported by men who are committed to ending the poverty and violence that face the majority of people in our country in influencing the choices that we make? How do we assert the powerhouse that Zanele referred to to ensure that our money is used to end poverty, violence and HIV/Aids. We work in a world where power is the power of patriarchal fear and hate and the power that we must work with today and tomorrow and the days to come is the power of love from within our hearts. That will give us the collective power of love and courage to transform our society. I thank you.

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