Is it just me, or has it become fashionable for people who hold official positions to speak or write in their personal capacities, even when they are expressing views about the things that are in their line of work?
This is completely disingenuous. On the one hand it allows the beneficiaries of such talk to make whatever capital they can of the pronouncements, but disassociate themselves from them if they find infertile soil.
So in keeping with the trend, I will vehemently disagree with an editorial that appeared in the pages of our beloved newspaper last Friday bemoaning the decision of the ANC Women’s League not to endorse a female candidate for the presidency of their party. All this I will do in my personal capacity.
The women’s movement cannot simply use political and emotional blackmail to make its point. Living in an open, free and secular society demands that no issues should be beyond scrutiny.
Just as we need to question whether skin-colour affirmative action or economic empowerment are the best ways of bringing about redress, we cannot be expected to cow into submission because we might just walk into a male-chauvinist template.
To argue that by making its decision to back a man, the league has failed women who are under the yoke of a patriarchy is to deliberately mix issues. The first is that it is indisputable that patriarchy, as with all other forms of unfair distribution of power and influence in society, is an evil to be eradicated. It does not follow, however, that thinking a man would be the best person to lead one or another political party makes one indifferent to what is wrong with patriarchy.
The league’s decision to endorse Zuma for the leadership of its party — if it is on the basis that its members believe he is the right person to lead the party through what is its most trying period — is therefore more progressive than it is reactionary. Demanding of women to choose someone because she is a woman is reactionary and marginalises women. It suggests that they can see leadership qualities only on the basis of likeness to themselves.
Stretched to its logical conclusion, Africans who think that Helen Zille is the best person to lead Cape Town are either lackeys of white rule or their decision is, in the words of feminist and gender activist Nomboniso Gasa, an ”erasure of [African people’s] voice and dismissal of [their] own struggles”.
This suggests that the only way to measure the league’s seriousness about the emancipation of women is if it proposes a woman candidate for the ANC presidency. It would be as absurd as thinking that the most faithful adherence to the spirit of black consciousness is to have a default position that every senior or influential position in the political space must go to an African person for no other reason than that they are black.
We cannot afford to be this simplistic. The struggle for non-racialism and non-sexism still requires that we establish a meritocracy that is not based on the content of our melanin or the amount of Y or X chromosomes. It is this kind of thinking — appointing people on the basis of their Africanness or sex — that has caused such resentment by both Africans and whites who respectively see themselves as tokens or marginalised.
Given that the ANC leadership contest has been more about personality clashes than policy issues, it would be useful if those so hurt by the Women’s League decision tell us who they think was an obvious choice that was overlooked because of the prevailing patriarchy within the ANC.
Since I am not a member of the league or the ANC or any other political party, I am not qualified to say whether the ANC is run on a patriarchal basis. It might very well be, just like there are African people who think that white is right, the ANC women also thought that the leadership of their party should be vested in the hands of men because they are men. It would be a pity and, frankly, I think it is too far-fetched.
As the old struggle song goes, Igama lamakhosikazi malibongwe (praise be to women). It is praise to them for fighting the institutional odds and not asking for handouts and political favours. I cannot imagine any of those women accepting nomination to the leadership of their organisation on the sole basis that they are women who were nominated by other women.
It is the height of inconsistency to argue that women have as much capacity to make up their minds on matters that affect them and then condemn them if they don’t act according to the whims of a dominant strain of thought of some lobby group, however influential that lobby believes itself to be.
Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya works for the Mail & Guardian. He writes in his personal capacity