President Thabo Mbeki on Friday mooted the possibility of amending the South African and African National Congress (ANC) constitutions to provide for better gender equality.
Writing in his weekly newsletter, he said the party’s decision after the 2006 local government elections that its elected municipal council representatives will be constituted on the basis of gender equality — the 50-50 principle — had been eminently correct.
Later this year, the ANC will hold its five-year policy conference, to be followed by its 52nd national conference.
Mbeki said it ”must surely be self-evident” that the policy conference ”must and will” address the issue of gender equality, to ensure the ANC builds on its decision and actions regarding the local government elections in order to further entrench the principle and practice of gender equality in the fundamental reconstruction of society.
The national conference, to be held in Limpopo in December, will consider the decisions of the policy conference, as well as debate and decide upon any other policy issues it might identify.
”However, like the policy conference, it cannot avoid taking decisions about the issue central to our democracy of gender equality.”
Mbeki said while he, personally, is bound to respect the decisions of the ANC policy and national conferences, which will, as before, emanate from an open democratic process, he cannot imagine that these conferences will fail to take decisions on two strategically important issues.
These are, firstly, the amendment of the ANC’s constitution to provide for gender equality in the party’s structures, and secondly, the amendment of the country’s Constitution to provide for gender equality in the institutions of state.
The struggle to achieve the emancipation of women is, in good part, a struggle to defeat deeply entrenched social and individual prejudices that present themselves to the people holding these prejudices as accepted and standard social norms, he said.
”This creates the immense difficulty that it becomes virtually impossible to change the mind of the prejudiced person, because he or she considers his or her prejudice as self-evident truth, and draws comfort and sustenance from empirically derived knowledge that a critical mass of members of society holds the same views as the person who is a prisoner of prejudice.”
The ANC has to continue to act as an informed and critical agency to combat the persisting gender inequality in South Africa.
”To do this successfully, we must constantly challenge the prejudices we carry in our heads, which act as barriers to a speedy advance towards the realisation of the goals of gender equality and the emancipation of women.
”As long as we allow these prejudices to persist and inform our actions, so long will we not be able truthfully to describe ourselves as revolutionary democrats,” Mbeki said. — Sapa