Governance

This government is our government

The current national government headed by President Thabo Mbeki is an ANC government, which continues to implement the policies and programmes of the movement. This government came into office in 2004 with a clear mandate from the people of South Africa based on the ANC's election manifesto.

Since then, the national government, together with the nine provincial administrations, has gone about its work guided by the policies of the ANC and the decisions of its constitutional structures.

The ANC is proud of the achievements of its government since 1994. Working together with the people, ANC-led governments have made important progress in tackling poverty, building the economy in a sustainable manner, and creating jobs at an accelerated pace. By the same measure, the ANC accepts responsibility for whatever shortcomings there may have been. Some of these were identified in Polokwane, and resolutions taken on how to address areas where our policies have not been as effective as they should have been.

Government's annual development indicators quantify the progress being made on several fronts to improve the lives of South Africans. They also point to areas where problems remain. Independent research confirms that most of our people rate highly the work government has done on the provision of land, housing, social grants, education and health care. But they remain concerned about unemployment and the cost of living.

Working together with its government at national, provincial and local level, the ANC will continue to focus on these challenges.

In debating the relationship between the ANC and its government, it is important to understand how the ANC directs the work of government.

Before a general election the ANC undergoes an extensive process of discussion and consultation to develop an election manifesto. That is what the organisation takes to the people during an election, outlining the main programmes it will undertake if elected into office. The manifesto is informed by the ANC's policies, adopted as resolutions at its national conference. For the 2004 manifesto, the ANC relied on the resolutions of the Stellenbosch Conference, which took place in December 2002.

As the ANC approaches the 2009 elections, it will draw up a new manifesto that describes the organisation's plans for the following five years. The new manifesto will be guided by the resolutions adopted in Polokwane in December last year. It is on the basis of this manifesto that the ANC will seek a new five-year mandate.

The ANC will also conduct a thorough review of the performance and capacity of all serving MPs and MPLs. This will ensure that the list process, by which the ANC selects its candidates for the 2009 election, will be better informed. The organisation takes care to choose candidates who it has confidence in to work to improve the lives of our people.

Of course, a manifesto can only provide a broad outline of plans and priorities. Much more detailed work needs to be done to develop, cost and implement programmes. And once the programmes are underway, they need to be monitored and evaluated. Where there are problems, they need to be corrected.

Political centre

The ANC as an organisation gets involved in these activities in a number of ways. At each level, constitutional structures are responsible for guiding the work of governments led by the ANC.

This is based on the understanding that the ANC is the strategic political centre guiding the work of all its public representatives, deployees and cadres. It is understood that policy development, evaluation and review should emanate from the constitutional structures of the movement. Cadres deployed into government and other centres of power are therefore responsible for the implementation of ANC policy and need to account to the organisation on progress, shortcomings or challenges with respect to putting into practice these policies.

At a national level, subcommittees of the National Executive Committee (NEC) process issues relating to governance in areas like economic transformation, social transformation, peace and stability, international relations, and other areas of government work. They look at the detail of policy and how its being implemented. They report on these matters to the NEC and make recommendations where changes may be needed.

On 8 January each year, the anniversary of the formation of the ANC, the NEC produces the January 8th Statement, which outlines the priorities and tasks for the year. This covers both the general organisational tasks and those relating to governance. The statement acts as a line of march for all ANC structures and cadres.

Shortly after the statement is released, the NEC holds a legkotla, to which it invites key deployees in government. This meeting maps out a more detailed programme of action across several areas of work. Its outcomes feed into the cabinet lekgotla held shortly thereafter

Through these mechanisms, among other others, the ANC has been able to ensure that the work of government is directed by the organisation, and that those deployed in government remain accountable to the organisation for implementing the popular mandate the organisation has received.

Polokwane agreed that the ANC should work to further enhance its own capacity for monitoring and evaluating the implementation of policy. For this reason, Polokwane agreed that the establishment of a Policy Institute was a priority.

There is also the matter of timing. By the time the NEC holds its lekgotla in January each year, government's planning and budgeting processes are far advanced. It is difficult at such a late stage to make any major adjustments. The NEC is therefore looking at how it can synchronise its own strategic planning exercises with government.

Since Polokwane, the ANC has continued to direct the work of its government. The conference resolutions, the January 8th Statement 2008 and the NEC lekgotla decisions were, for example, reflected in the plans outlined by President Mbeki in the state of the nation address at the opening of parliament.

The new NEC committees have been working with the relevant ministers and deputy ministers to ensure the Polokwane resolutions are implemented.

In a new development, the NEC, at its July meeting, identified a set of medium term priorities for government. This took place shortly before cabinet's July lekgotla, which discusses plans for the next financial year and is an important step in developing the next budget. In this way, the NEC was able to guide government expenditure priorities for the remainder of the term of office of this administration, and lay the basis for the incoming administration after the 2009 elections.

The ANC will continue to support the work of its government, and will continue to provide strategic direction to the work of its deployees in government.

** Gwede Mantashe is the Secretary General of the ANC.

Women's Day 2008

Strive for gender parity across society

At its conference in Polokwane in December 2007, the ANC took a groundbreaking decision that there should be gender parity in the composition of all its structures. As South Africans gather to celebrate Women's Day on 9 August, we should make a firm commitment to extend the principle of 50/50 gender representation across all sectors of society.

The ANC has played a leading role in improving the representation of women in political decision-making institutions in South Africa. It decided that women should comprise a minimum of 30% of the candidates it fielded in the first democratic elections in 1994.

After the 1994 election women comprised 28% of members of the National Assembly. After the 1999 election it reached 30% and in 2004 it reached 32.75%. This places South Africa in the top ten of countries with relatively high levels of women representation in parliament.

In the 2006 local government elections, the ANC again made history increasing the minimum representation of women in its candidate lists to 50%. This decision accounts for the steady increase of the proportion of women in local government - from just 19% after the 1995 elections to 30% after the 2000 local elections to 40% after the 2006 elections.

The ANC came close to achieving its goal in 2006. Nationally, 46% of the ANC councillors were women. And of the total number of women councillors in the country, 79% were ANC women councillors. In this way, the ANC's commitment to quotas has fundamentally changed the composition of the country's political institutions.

Three years later it entrenched this quota into its constitution, requiring that at least a third of members of all ANC executive structures be women. And now, in Polokwane, it increased that quota to fifty percent. As a consequence, half of the members of the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) and half of the National Working Committee (NWC) are members. As elections are held for structures at lower levels of the organisation, these two will become representative.

The ANC's experience of gender quotas, stretching back more than a decade, shows that they are an effective mechanism to improve the participation of women in decision-making. Far from being a token gesture, quotas have proven useful in removing some of the barriers to entry for women into spheres that were once dominated by men.

In a paper written for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), Swedish academic Drude Dahlerup says quotas for women represent a shift from one concept of equality to another.

"The classic liberal notion of equality was a notion of 'equal opportunity' or 'competitive equality'. Removing the formal barriers, for example, giving women voting rights, was considered sufficient. The rest was up to the individual women.

"Following strong feminist pressure in the last few decades, as expressed for instance in the Beijing Platform for Action of 1995, a second concept of equality is gaining increasing relevance and support: the notion of 'equality of result'.

"The argument is that real equal opportunity does not exist just because formal barriers are removed. Direct discrimination and a complex pattern of hidden barriers prevent women from getting their share of political influence. Quotas and other forms of positive measures are thus a means towards equality of result. The argument is based on the experience that equality as a goal cannot be reached by formal equal treatment as a means. If barriers exist, it is argued, compensatory measures must be introduced as a means to reach equality of result. From this perspective, quotas are not discrimination (against men), but compensation for structural barriers that women meet in the electoral process."

However, outside the political arena, the representation of women in important sectors of society is lagging far behind.

According to a 2004 census commissioned by the Businesswomen's Association (BWA), although women constitute 52% of South Africa's adult population they make up only 41% of the working South African population. This proportion decreases dramatically as one moves up the corporate pyramid. Only 15% of all executive managers and 7% of all directors on listed JSE companies were women.

The Department of Labour's employment equity analysis report from 2004 notes that in large companies, male employees represent the majority of employees in all of the occupational levels. This is most evident at the top (86%) and senior (78%) management levels and least evident at the semi-skilled level (56%).

The report found that this pattern was not likely to change quickly, as reflected in an analysis of recruitment over the period: "In particular, male employees dominated the high-skilled levels of recruitment in 2004, representing 81% of top management recruits. Females accounted for 56% of senior management recruits, while recruitments on midmanagement, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled where predominantly male in 2004."

The situation is better in the public service. While women made up 53% of the public service workforce in 2006, they only constituted 30% of senior management positions. Government has developed a strategic framework for gender equality in the public service that aims, among other things, to achieve gender parity in all senior management appointments by April 2009.

Writing in the ANC discussion journal Umrabulo in March 2007, ANC NEC member Thenjiwe Mtintso said: "Numbers are only a small part of the arsenal we use on our multi-pronged struggle for the complete eradication of unequal power relations between men and women. As attitudes tend to lag far behind everything else quantitative changes do influence and play a role in achievement of qualitative changes."

"Empirical evidence and lived experience in the ANC and in South Africa shows that access and participation of a sizeable number of women in decision-making structures has been critical for the struggle against patriarchy and the transformation of society. Women's entry for instance into the NEC and the Cabinet, traditionally male domains, has not only changed the 'face' of the NEC and Cabinet, but has fostered, in many different ways, gender consciousness and a move towards engendered policies. These women have contributed to putting women and gender related matters at the centre of the ANC and Cabinet discourse and agenda and thus strengthened the struggle for women's emancipation and gender equality."

If quotas are only part of a multi-pronged strategy to advance gender equality, they are surely also only an intermediate measure. As Mtintso says: "That mechanisms [such as gender quotas] must be used is beyond debate, but entrenching democracy such that these mechanisms become redundant is an ongoing struggle for all of us."

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