Politics of love and courage

I stand here in memory of Ruth First, a critical communist who was killed for her beliefs and her activism. Like those who have shown the greatest courage, First knew fear.

Her daughters have captured her vulnerability on paper and film. In Hilda Bernstein’s book, The Rift, First’s youngest daughter, Robyn, describes getting her mother to admit to her fear and vulnerability in prison. Robyn talks of ”being brought up in a country-size struggle … there isn’t room for imperfection within that. There’s a lot of humanity that gets lost in that.”

I stand here today, aware of our fears, imperfections and of our humanity. My lecture is is dedicated to First and all those who have experimented and continue to experiment with politics as the power of love and courage.

It was love and not hate that was the most powerful force in the fight against apartheid. Love for child, lover, friend, parent, comrade, community, country … love for our world, for humanity, for peace, equality and justice. The best in our movement resolved that hatred of apartheid’s brutality would not lead them to emulate that brutality, nor to become heroes in one context and bullies in another.

The African National Congress, in its alliance with the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, maintained that the struggle against a racist, unequal and misogynistic state must be guided by equality, non-racialism and non-sexism. This reflected an understanding of power, which proclaims in the Freedom Charter that ”South Africa belongs to all who live in it … ” Ours was a movement that recognised the need to transform the systemic power of race, class and gender within a commitment to the poorest.

The ANC holds the history and the herstory of our country, to the greatest extent that any political party has, for all of us. It is inseparable in our collective memory from the most heroic and the most treasured. Those who hold office in the ANC, by virtue of the elections in 1994, 1999 and 2004, are entrusted with this memory and hope.

Those in politics today occupy the institutions of power that for decades were imbued with the values, vision and objectives of the apartheid state. The ongoing challenge is to ensure that its transformation reflects the interests of the poorest. Those who vest the ANC with power in the elections include many who may not even be able to afford to buy an ANC membership card as compared to those now able to offer massive sponsorships.

In this decade of democracy the epic courage of those who paid the ultimate price is today honoured. Young comrades such as Phila Ndwandwe (who was kept naked for days before she was murdered by state security), and of whom the murderer commented: ”She was brave, this one … she would not talk.” First, Chris Hani, Victoria and Griffiths Mxenge, and so many others. We remember and honour too the everyday acts of courage — of survival in an apartheid state in which homelessness and hunger were rife.

In Elinor Sisulu’s book [Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In our Lifetime], Albertina Sisulu talks of the difficulties she experienced when Walter Sisulu was in prison. She talks of her gratitude to a community, which although poor, was willing to share the little it had. At the World Court of Women in Khayelitsha in 2001, one of the jurors, Zanele Mbeki, commented that although she had known Albertina for so long it was the first time that she had heard her own story. A story that was distinct from, yet intertwined with, her role as wife, mother and comrade.

We cannot hear only half the story, only half the truth of our nation. It is time to understand and appreciate the everyday acts of courage that women, particularly, played in ensuring the survival of families and communities. In the context of masculinity defined by absent fatherhood it is time to assert new definitions of manhood. ”Women’s work”, inside and outside the home, needs to be understood, valued and shared equally by the men in their lives, by society and by the state.

In 1994 I was deeply honoured by the ANC to be part of a team of MPs, which included wise older women such as Sisulu, Dorothy Nyembe, Ruth Mompati, Gertrude Shope, Lydia Ngwenya, Mary Turok, Liz Abrahams, Frene Ginwala and many others. We entered Parliament at a time when the power of parliaments across the world was being severely limited by global ideological pressures for decreasing the power of governments.

Against the background of an apartheid, capitalist and patriarchal regime which used laws as a central weapon in meeting its objectives, Parliament was an important site of transformation.

The word Parliament is derived from the words ”to speak”. The question is: Whose voices does Parliament speak? Whose voices does it hear in the formulation of constitutions, policies, legislation, budgets, programmes and institutions? I believed that if we addressed the needs of women as the majority of the poorest this it would have a ripple-up effect on the rest of society.

The challenge was to ensure that in the work we did we respected the power and agency of women, without the paternalistic temptation to reduce women to victims. Those who hold office are called upon to fully understand and to be true to this mandate, not as an act of charity but as an act of competence as MPs. Central to our approach, therefore, has to be the expansion of political, economic, social and personal choices for all South Africa’s citizens. I would like to share a few of the experiments Parliament engaged in to try to ensure this.

Parliament established the joint monitoring committee on the improvement quality of life and status of women (JMC), to ensure that the work of government would improve the quality of lives of women across South Africa. Its brief was to monitor government’s implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination (Cedaw) and the Beijing Platform for Action. I was elected chairperson at its inception and served until my resignation in 2002. The JMC prioritised addressing poverty, HIV/Aids and violence, and held hearings on each of these with those affected, experts and government departments.

It drew up a list of legislative, budget and policy priorities and worked with the rest of Parliament, government departments and civil society to effect more than 80% of these changes into law. These changes include progressive legislation dealing with customary marriage, child maintenance, domestic violence and improved provisions in labour legislation on topics such as maternity leave, sexual harassment and discrimination.

In 1994 I was deployed by the ANC to the joint standing committee on finance, a vibrant committee chaired by Gill Marcus. In staying true to my mandate, I proposed in the 1994 Budget debates that in expanding political power to economic power we needed to analyse budgets. The yardstick of change had to be change in the lives of the poorest women.

This experiment, known as the South African Women’s Budget Initiative, initially made significant advances. The government committed itself to decreasing military spending and reallocating the savings to women’s empowerment in its 1996 post-Beijing Cabinet Commitment. The 1998/1999 National Budget Review included gender responsive budgeting in selected programmes and committed itself to ensuring that this would inform the entire Budget in future.

The government committed to producing gender-disaggregated data to measure whose lives were changing and how and to count women’s unpaid labour. These commitments have been effected through Statistics South Africa. However, in the 2000-2001 Budget gender-budgeting in South Africa, which has inspired more than 50 other countries, came to an abrupt end.

In the first few years we were very clear about our mandate. In the Budget debates First’s husband Joe Slovo, former Umkhonto weSizwe commander, argued against the corvettes and other military hardware being punted by the old order generals together with new enthusiastic recruits from our own party. On August 4 1994 he stated: ”… we can certainly ensure that this bird does not change into an albatross around the neck of the RDP [Reconstruction and Development Programme] in the next Budget … There can be little doubt in my mind that South Africa’s greatest defence will be a satisfied population.”

By 1996 the RDP office was closed down and a new macro-economic strategy had been drafted by a team led by a World Bank consultant and consisting of, with one exception, white men. By 1998 negotiations on the arms deal were well under way and by 2001 it came into effect in our National Budget.

Registering my opposition in the defence budget to the arms deal was not an overnight decision. It had followed a number of attempts, since 1994, to engage this debate within the ANC and Parliament. I believed that I was at all times accountable to the ANC and to our mandate.

In the ANC caucus I raised the question of whether the arms spending was in line with the priorities that we ourselves had set as the ANC. The Defence Review and the Defence White Paper reiterated that the priority was socio-economic change.

In 1998, we had recognised the need to urgently address HIV/Aids in South Africa, as reflected in the speech of President Thabo Mbeki at the launch of the Aids partnership: ”For too long we have closed our eyes as a nation, hoping the truth was not so real. For many years, we have allowed the HI virus to spread, and at a rate in our country, which is one of the fastest in the world.”

However, by the time of the 13th International Aids Conference in Durban, things had changed so dramatically that it led Nelson Mandela to say: ”Now … the poor on our continent, will again carry a disproportionate burden of this scourge — would [they] if anyone cared to ask their opinions, wish that the dispute about the primacy of politics or science be put on the backburner and that we proceed to address the needs and concerns of those suffering and dying.”

The establishment of the Presidential advisory panel on Aids publicly profiled the debate of whether or not HIV caused Aids. Many of the ANC’s own health experts were angered at the fact that this debate was distracting us from implementing our own policy plan. At the same time the government’s 2000 to 2005 plan noted that from 1990 to 1999 HIV prevalence rose from 0,7% to 22,4%. Young women aged 20 to 30 had the highest rates and women under 20 years had the highest percentage increase. In these circumstances the JMC had an absolute obligation in terms of its mandate to hold hearings and to find ways to intervene to break through what appeared to be a tragic paralysis.

The hearings revealed the need for South Africa to have a holistic response to both prevention and treatment that addresses HIV/Aids, poverty and gender-based violence and that is driven by people living with Aids. It asked for an evaluation of policies and programmes to address unequal power relations, especially sexual inequality. It argued for a need for women and girls to be empowered as agents of change and to have clear choices every step of the way.

I was mandated to write this report, which was unanimously adopted by the committee on November 14 2001. A request that the report be tabled at the ANC caucus was eventually granted. It was met with overwhelming applause. There was a tangible sense of release and relief that finally someone had said what many had been thinking and experiencing. The recurring comment was: ”Thank you for your courage.”

I struggled to understand why some of the most courageous comrades I have ever met made this comment outside the caucus yet were silent within the caucus. In the following weeks I took the report to anyone in the ANC whom I thought would have some influence with the Cabinet and the national executive committee.

The JMC took the report to provincial workshops for feedback. However, progress on HIV/Aids was crudely damaged across South Africa. On International Women’s Day the whip in charge of the debate on Women’s Rights as Human Rights instructed me to speak on this topic without mentioning HIV/Aids.

My speech addressed our report and the promise from the hierarchy that it would soon be debated. The report’s key recommendations were eventually accepted by the Cabinet, in early 2002. This year the commitment to treatment has begun to be effected.

I do not claim to have clarity as to the causes of such tragic silence for so long on an issue of life and death in our country. It has made me reflect on the need to clarify our understanding of the collective and of loyalty, in the hope that we never again lose so much time and so many lives.

The tradition of the collective and the tradition of open debate in the ANC has been a proud and honourable tradition. There have, however, always been those who have attempted to reduce it to group-think. The collective and group-think are polar opposites. The collective is a celebration of the wisdom that resides within each one in the collective. It allows for vigorous and fearless debate and dialogue on the most difficult of issues. It knows that it is important to respect the experience and skills of each one in the collective.

Group-think is the celebration of the individual above the collective, in its naive and unquestioning acceptance of the leader as infallible. It renounces the courage that demands we be honest with those we love, even if they may not like what it is we have to say. In situations such as these, loyalty has to be defined not in terms of the party hierarchy in the government, but in terms of the poorest.

In First’s preface to Govin Mbeki’s The Peasants’ Revolt, she notes: ”He tells the sordid inside story of how chiefs chose power and were bamboozled and cajoled into accepting the Bantustan plan because they learnt there was something in it for them.”

Through the JMC’s works the minority status of married women under customary law and the marital power of the husband were finally abolished. However, the law on inheritance and succession, which was part of those priorities and addressed the crucial issue of land, disappeared.

This year Parliament rushed through a version of the Communal Land Rights Bill, which formally vested chiefs with power over the land and thus effectively over the women who live on and work the land. This in a context where the government spending on land reform has never exceeded 1% of the Budget, and in which the property rights clause of the Constitution effectively entrenches the inequitable situation of 85% of South Africans relegated to 13% of the land. During the hearings on the Bill Mama Shabalala of the Rural Women’s Movement presented cases of evictions of widows and divorced women: ”If the Bill gives amakhosi power over land our suffering will become worse. We will go back to the old days — yet we have been looking forward to rights of our own. If Parliament does not hear us and does not understand that we are talking about our lives, and suffering that is happening every day, then it is like the amakhosi. It also does not respect us.”

Globally women bear the brunt of poverty, HIV/Aids and violence.

According to the recently released International Labour Organisation study, the position of women workers globally has worsened. The military-industrial complex of the United States threatens and devastates countries through unilateral declarations of war that disregard multilateral decision-making bodies. The continuities of violence against women are expressed in the high rates of femicide (the murder of a woman by her partner) and rape on the battlefields as a weapon of war.

In South Africa the government’s own statistics are devastating. Labour Force Surveys 2000 and 2002 show that unemployment has increased more for African women than for any other group. The poverty rate among female-headed households in 1995 was 60%. Unemployment for women in rural areas was 53,6% in 2001. In 1995, only 17% of African women were in waged employment and only 9% were self-employed. The ANC’s overwhelming mandate of 2004 must result in change to this reality.

To love means to trust those we love as well as ourselves. It is a difficult thing to do. On each of the issues I have raised I believe that if we listen carefully to ourselves, to those directly affected, to our own experts who have been trained to look through the eyes of poor women, as well as to those in solidarity with us internationally and who are successfully challenging global constraints to meeting the needs of the poorest, we would have the courage to do what is in our best interests as a country.

In conclusion, I share a poem I wrote, entitled Silent, the letters of which also spell listen.

Silent

Pregs Govender presented this address as the third Ruth First Memorial Lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand on Wednesday. She is a former ANC MP