“We must congratulate Rwanda for achieving 48,8% of women representation in Parliament. This is the highest in the world. It means gender parity is no longer a dream but a reality in Africa,” said Lulu Xingwana, South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Minerals and Energy, to thunderous applause from more than 1 000 women who gathered in the South African capital, Pretoria, this week.
Although Rwanda’s elections took place in October 2003, the results are still news to many South African women — particularly those from the remoter parts of the country. It is exactly this delay in the flow of information between South Africa and the rest of the continent that organisers of the June 30 to July 4 meeting hope to address.
The conference, entitled Women in Solidarity with the African Union for Democracy, Peace and Development, is being held at the University of Pretoria under the auspices of the South African Women in Dialogue (Sawid) initiative. The African Union begins its annual summit next week in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
The Pretoria meeting is also intended to help South African women forge stronger relations with their counterparts elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
“The [South African] Department of Foreign Affairs has given us R2-million to dialogue with the civil society in the [strife-torn] Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC], Burundi and Sudan,” said Zanele Mbeki, wife of President Thabo Mbeki and convener of Sawid.
She added that talks will be held with women from Burundi in South Africa’s commercial capital, Johannesburg, next week from July 5 to 9. This follows a meeting with women from the DRC two years ago.
“We have gone to Burundi and the women of Burundi are now coming here,” Mbeki told delegates.
South Africa is trying to broker a peace in Burundi where, according to the London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International, more than 300 000 people have been killed since 1993 in civil conflict.
Discussions between Sawid and women from Sudan and Rwanda are also in the pipeline.
“The women want to know how South Africa handled the negotiations [to dismantle the apartheid system] and transition to democracy. They also want us to share with them how we managed to integrate our various forces into one army — and how we managed to collect all weapons from our fighters,” Mbeki noted.
“These types of dialogue reveal the great value of creating further platforms for women to share their experiences and thereby facilitate the strengthening of women’s participation in the management of peace and stability on our continent.”
The challenges to introducing this stability are formidable, however.
“Up to 350-million people, or half of Africa’s population, live on less than $1 a day. Life expectancy is 54 years, and only 58% have access to clean water,” Thoko Mpumlwana, a Sawid organiser, told the gathering. “It should be our agenda to work for peace and democracy in Africa. We should not sit comfortably [in South Africa] when there’s war in Africa.”
The continent is also home to about five million refugees and more than 10-million internally displaced persons, according to a 2003 report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Most of these people are children and women.
In addition, Africa faces a massive challenge in the form of the HIV/Aids pandemic. By 2003, about 28-million (or 70%) of the almost 40-million people infected with HIV around the world were living in sub-Saharan Africa — this according to the Joint UN Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids).
But South African women, who make up 52% of their country’s population, believe they can make a difference — even in the face of these overwhelming odds.
“South Africa has a formidable powerhouse of women who can change the face of this country and — together with our sisters in the continent — can change the face of Africa for the better,” Mbeki said.
Four of the nine officials who head provincial governments in South Africa are women. Thirty-three percent of its legislators are women, 42% of Cabinet posts are taken up by women — and 51% of deputy ministers are women, according to official statistics.
High-profile women in the government include Minister Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who is attending an AU ministerial meeting in Addis Ababa, in preparation for the summit. The extent to which the AU has itself managed to introduce gender equity in its various branches also came under discussion at the Pretoria gathering.
Sue van der Merwe, South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, says the AU wants 50% of all its posts filled by women within the next few years.
“Never again should women in Africa find themselves on the periphery,” she told the conference. — IPS