The past week has seen a flurry of feminist presidential activity. President Thabo Mbeki is emerging as a leading new man — the term to describe that individual who has seen the light, found his feminine side and can walk the talk as well as change the nappies.
Last Friday he established a presidential working group on women. The working groups are Mbeki’s kitchen cabinet, the alternative structures he uses to take the temperature of the nation. They meet regularly and fill the presidential ear — in the past five years, he has started these fireside chats with youth, religious, trade union, business, higher education and commercial agriculture groups. Now, finally, it’s women.
And it’s never too late for a brother to find his inner woman.
On the same day Mbeki started the group, he also spoke at the African National Congress Youth League conference in Johannesburg.
Mbeki’s key message is possibly more significant than all of the rest of the conference deliberations. He announced the ANC would move to full gender equality when it prepares its lists for the election in 2009. This means that every second place on the party’s lists of representatives to the national and provincial parliaments will be female — no other country in the world has reached such numerical equality. Mbeki hinted at his new bent when he led the way by appointing four female premiers out of a complement of nine in April.
His Cabinet appointments are also heading toward parity — with 12 of 27 cabinet appointments in female hands, he is one shy of reaching his own goal. The gender quota is not easy to sell in any party and so it isn’t in the ANC, even though the party always twinned the struggle against apartheid with a platform of equal gender rights.
Once in power, it has reserved a third of the place on its lists for women but before the last two elections, party bosses had to gerrymander the lists to ensure that the women were not bunched near the bottom in unelectable positions. Ahead of the last local elections in 2000, no party met a challenge enshrined in municipal legislation, which recommends that half of all elected councillors are women. This was despite the fact that the ANC drew up the legislation and that it was pushed by the party’s women’s lobby.
Like other parties, the ANC met resistance from the men in its rank and file who could talk the talk, but were not ready to walk the walk. Now Mbeki has raised the stakes: as ANC chairperson, he has pledged a 50% quota, which will make for an interesting next election.
A mercurial and intellectual president, Mbeki ranges from issue to issue. With his ”African renaissance” and black consciousness policies firmly in the bag (conceptually if not practically), the president has this year alone dabbled with third-way politics, the second economy and feminism. All of this is about legacy-building: Mbeki is actively shaping how he will be remembered when he quits the presidential stage in 2009.
But he is also choosing a successor. And it does not take too much crystal-ball gazing to see that Mbeki is preparing the ground to anoint Africa’s first female president and the person most likely to continue to plough an Mbeki field. For young ex-presidents such as he will be, such a successor is coverted, for power can be exercised through her. That person is likely to be the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, and when he anoints, it will be in the context he has created: that of bolstering female leadership. With the turf so prepared, nobody can accuse the president of pushing his own candidate for his motive will be grander than that — it will be spun as the logical end to his commitment to equality, to empowerment and female leadership. What faction in the ANC dare speak out against such noble ideals — certainly not the left nor the Young Turks or the ”internals” (the term used to described those who fought the struggle at home)?
Mbeki’s legacy will be intact and the chosen successor in place.
Again, Mbeki has proven himself the wiliest of politicians, a feminist and a queen-maker.
It is some game plan, but the jury’s out on whether the execution will be perfect. For one thing, there’s Deputy President Jacob Zuma who is still very much in the presidential ring.ÂÂ
Attempts to rubbish the evidence of his alleged palm-greasing (the labelling of the fax sent by a French arms executive as a piece of scrap paper with absent-minded doodlings instead of crucial evidence) is also likely to be included in Zuma’s arsenal when he fires succession salvoes.ÂÂ
Also interesting is the fact that the ANC Youth League, Mbeki’s most enthusiastic backers in the ANC, did not immediately rise to his challenge. Only one of its national executive committee of five is a woman. By 2008, as election fever next hots up, Mbeki will be an outgoing and therefore lame-duck president, and then the old men may yet put a spanner in the works. These days it’s politics as usual — but a 50% gender quota is politics as unusual.