Ferial Haffajee:TAKING STOCK
`Sjoe! I gave it to him,” says Nocwaka Lamani in an interview at her parliamentary office. The man she gave it to was former law and order minister Adriaan Vlok, whose forces had arrested Lamani’s son, Tango.
“I told him, `I am demanding my son back by May 11 1989 because I am going to Singapore.'” Apartheid’s man of steel was obviously shaken by the feisty Lamani, who led a delegation to his parliamentary offices. “By May 11, they were released,” chuckles the bespectacled woman, who is now a member of the National Council of Provinces (NCOP).
That was her first visit to Parliament. Now Vlok’s gone and she has been installed. Her office in the Old Assembly building with its foreboding desk and dark furniture is a lot like Vlok’s where she crossed the threshold as a protester 10 years ago. Her posters of Chris Hani and Nelson Mandela, the doilies and pink tablecloth ring the physical changes to the halls of power.
Among the more profound tenets of transformation of the past four years has been the high number of women in power. From the sari-draped parliamentary Speaker, Frene Ginwala, and her deputy, Baleka Mbete- Kgotsitsile, who run Parliament, to a phalanx of female ministers, deputy ministers and the shock troops like Lamani, South Africa is a sisterly republic.
It has the seventh-highest number of women members of Parliament in the world. In Africa it is second only to the Seychelles in the number of female representatives and it is so by design.
In 1994, the African National Congress reserved one-third of the places on its election lists for women. It has done so again this year. A look at the party lists shows that women are evenly distributed throughout and not packed near the bottom where people are likely to hit the scrap heap. Each candidate is identified by an “M” or an “F”.
“It’s interesting,” says political analyst Keith Gottschalk, “that they chose to mark gender rather than any other form like race, provincial or ethnic representivity.”
Some women in the ANC had wanted the quota beefed up to one in two candidates. They failed in their bid, but it remains the only party with a quota of seats reserved for women.
The Democratic Party and the New National Party take a principled stance against the quota, arguing that it degrades merit and installs a glass ceiling for women.
“What happens if there are enough women to go beyond the quota?” says Ethne Papenfus, the DP speaker of the Northern Cape legislature. “The incumbent could be regarded as a token.”
It was the NNP’s insistence against the accommodation of more women that prompted the recent defection to the DP of Western Cape politician Pauline Cupido. She was among the key coloured members of the party supposed to comprise the “new” in the NNP.
“The NNP is a male chauvinist party!” says Cupido, a measured and God-fearing woman not usually given to such outbursts. “The final straw came in December. We asked them to consider that at least one in five places be reserved for women. They booed me! Whenever female members stood up, they were clearly not interested. They [male MPs] started talking on their own.”
Faced with the likes of Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma, deputy chair of the NCOP Naledi Pandor and MP Pregs Govender, only the the dumbest of male ANC politicos would boo. The gender quota is not up for debate in the ruling party and their gains have given a fillip to women in more conservative parties. Says the NNP’s Martha Olckers, who serves in the Western Cape legislature: “If it weren’t for the ANC ladies and the pressure they put on the government, females would have been much worse off.”
The serene Govender is the antithesis of the caricatured feminist. Doe-eyed and stylish, she is credited by many as being the female power in Parliament. “There is solid vindication of the quota system,” says Govender. “We have made changes to the law in every area, from water to land to trade and industry.”
The NNP’s Sheila Camerer remembers battling for years in the old Parliament to get discriminatory tax laws changed – married women paid more tax than their husbands because their salaries were ostensibly used for luxuries. “[Former finance minister] Derek Keys always said, `It’s just not possible.'”
The tax tables were rewritten in 1995. Abortion was legalised in 1996. In 1998 the Customary Marriage Bill was passed by Parliament. It will accord full legal recognition to customary marriages and give equal power in marriage to rural women. In 1998 the Domestic Violence Bill was passed. With this, battered people will be able to get expeditious interdicts against abusers.
New labour laws which make maternity leave mandatory have meant that the days of women factory workers binding their stomachs to hide a burgeoning baby are (theoretically) past, and strip searches no longer happen.
A breast-feeding code is written into the new Basic Conditions of Employment Act and the sexual harassment code in the Labour Relations Act can be used to punish unwanted workplace slap and tickle. Women’s laws have kept the government printer very busy in the past four years. The challenge now is to bridge the divide between law and practice.
In that divide is a cesspool of funding shortages, bad attitudes and a skills gap among the civil servants who must carry out the new laws. How do you enforce a workplace breast- feeding code when there is a dire shortage of inspectors to enforce even the new domestic worker laws?
How seriously must you take new domestic violence legislation when just last year a woman was shot and killed by her violent husband in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court? What is the use of a sisterly republic when it seems powerless to stem the risk of rape which stalks every one of us?
“I don’t think that laws will mean that automatically things will change,” says Govender. The challenge of the next four years, she says, is for women in power to watch-dog the implementation of the new laws. In Parliament and provincial legislatures real power should be vested in the parliamentary committees where the oversight of government departments should be at its most incisive. It is here that draft legislation can be tossed back, where civil servants can be called to account and where change is pushed.
“I enjoy the committees more than I do Parliament [the National Assembly],” says the Pan Africanist Congress’s Patricia de Lille, who has been one of the more successful members of Parliament. She uses Assembly debates to answer letters from the public and complains, “Nothing happens [at the debates] besides publication in Hansard and the media.”
The Inkatha Freedom Party’s Ruth Rabinowitz gave up on debates when her considered response to the government’s Aids policy was overshadowed by a male politician’s blather about the moral degeneration of society and of members of Parliament using prostitutes.
Many women say that if Parliament – the legislative arm of government – is to be the locale of power and not the executive, then women must be better trained. Many women MPs had not seen draft statutes and, having come from the trenches, were not au fait with parliamentary proceedings.
“MPs need a legal desk to explain legislation to them. When the department briefs you, you have no way of understanding. You’re not debating with effective input,” says Lamani, who remains as forbidding to the new order as she was to the last.
“Women have brought a different culture to Parliament. It’s less of a beer-swilling, let’s sort things out in the bar kind of place,” says Rabinowitz. Parliament has a crche now. It closes at 6pm whereas before it started late in the day [because former MPs ran their businesses in the morning] and went on until late at night.
“Male MPs have well-managed homes,” says Mbete- Kgotsitsile. “The female MP has to worry about groceries and whether the children have done their homework.”
Half-jokingly she assigns herself another task to assist the next batch of women MPs. “We must look in greater detail at how to provide a wife for the woman MP.”
Some of these interviews will be included in a book to be published later this year by the Commission on Gender Equality and the Parliamentary Women’s Group