Women 2001 ANC WOMEN'S LEAGUE NATIONAL CONFERENCE PRESIDENTIAL REPORT 24-27 April 1997 Unity, Peace & Development

THE ANC WOMEN'S LEAGUE ON TO
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Comrades, Sisters, Daughters,

We meet again in Conference: this time on the threshold of the 21st Century, just three years ahead of us. It is a good time to pause and consider our prime contribution to humanity during the Twentieth Century and to plan our commitments for the 21st.

The League in the Twentieth Century

The ANCWL can lay claim to being a key factor in the battle against racism in the Twentieth Century. It was infect the only women's organisation with an overtly political agenda to dismantle apartheid and to establish a non-racial democracy in the country. During the last century, thousands of League members suffered imprisonment, and thousands engaged in bloody confrontations with the police. The League drew its membership from the lowest strata of South African womanhood and it is there, among the illiterate and semi-literate, the impoverished women of our country that make up the bulk of our women, that our heart and our work lies.

Prey to tribal law as implemented by the colonialists and victims of the racist laws which controlled their entry into the urban areas and virtually confined them to the rural, it is little wonder that our women reacted as strongly as they did against their dominators and persecutors. Our women were the first to take the offensive against the racist government We salute the freedom fighters who in the firs decade of the present century waged a courageous anti-pass crusade against passes

African and coloured women in the Orange Free State and Indian women in Natal and the Transvaal. Our women continued the anti-pass campaign, and the campaign against laws that prevented them from brewing beer, into the fifties and sixties, and mounted a rolling mass resistance throughout the country

Our women were a significant sector of that powerful force in the seventies and eighties that finally dislodged the Nationalist government.

We salute and remember our great leaders - Bertha Mkhize, Lilian Ngoyi, Albertina Sisulu, Helen Joseph, Josie Mpama, Ida Mtwana, Florence Mposho, Florence Matomela, Kate Molale, Lilian Ngoyi, Mrs Madinoge-Sekukuni-Land, Mrs Hettie Dupreeze (garment worker's union), Violet Weinburg, Helen Joseph, Mrs GM Molly Naicker (Dr Naicker's wife), Mrs TN Naidoo, Mrs Pillay (Pretoria), Mrs Amina Pahad, Mrs Mariam Cachalia, Mary Moodley, Dr K. Goonam (Durban - still alive), Mrs Cissy Gool, Elizabeth Mafekeng, Ray Alexander, Mrs Baard, Mrs Zihlangu, Mrs Annie Silinga, Lily Diedrick and Dora Tamara.

The League was a constituent founder member of the Federation of South African Women, which in the fifties spearheaded the historic pass protest to Pretoria, and it was part of the Black Women's Federation in the mid-seventies which mobilised women during our most difficult and vulnerable periods of history. We acknowledge the contribution of the Black Sash in mobilising white women against apartheid in this century. We also acknowledge the contributions of the Inkatha Women's Brigade.

We remember too, the women who allied with us and worked with us, women from the Indian Congresses, Zainab Asvat, Amina Cachalia, Amina Pahad, Marie Naicker, Phyllis Naidoo, to mention a few.

The League in the Twenty-first Century

Now, standing at the threshold of the 21st Century, we have to plan for that century, both in the context of South Africa and the world. Our fundamental commitment should be to eliminate poverty and to improve the quality of life of women so that they in turn will improve the quality of life of their families. We must plan to form links with women throughout the world, in particular, with women in Africa and women in Asia. We were far too repressed, far too involved with our own problems to make links with women outside South Africa.

In our own country, we should plan to co-operate with organisations involved in the study of poverty. We should work out a time frame within which poverty maybe eliminated, our entire country electrified, water piped into every home, a time frame within which the housing backlog can be wiped out and our people adequately empowered through education and skills training to be free to provide their own needs.

In the area of health, we need to put our weight behind organisations specialising in combating disease, on both preventative end curative levels. Aids is a disease to which women are more vulnerable because they are far less in control of the sexual act. They are often the passive recipients of men's sexual advances, their subordinate and dependent relation to men, even their husbands, depriving them of exercising their own will in the matter. The ANCWL will have to become more proactive in the 21st Century against diseases such as Aids.

We have to put our full weight behind the campaign to save our environment, so that we may save our world. We must be more supportive of the government in its efforts to promote the welfare of the people. At the same time we must be more vigilant and ensure that the government works for the people.

We step into the 21st Century, taking with us our entire heritage of science and technology, the arts end philosophies we developed in the twentieth century. The Legacy is breath-taking. It was in this century that we made our inroad into outer space, conquered a whole range of diseases and revolutionised our system of communication, we founded the UNO. The list is endless. It is also a century in which colonialism and racism ended, and the domination of women began to be seriously questioned. No other century has left as rich a bequest as the 20th Century.

But the 20th Century also leaves behind a legacy of violence, the nature and scale of which is also unparalleled in human history. We saw two world wars in this century, we saw the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We saw the splitting of India into three countries amid the most abject violations of human life and dignity.

Women contributed little to either the brilliance or the ravages of the Twentieth Century. We should plan to be more pro-active as women in the 21st Century. At the end of that century, let our mark equal that of the men in brilliance and goodness.

Our Record in South Africa

We in South Africa step into the 21st Century on the arms of our new constitution which is among the best in the world.

The majority of the women members of parliament are ANC candidates and they are members of the ANCWL. The League thus shares with the ANC responsibility for the effective delivery of democracy to the people. While ours is a Government of National Unity, it is essentially an ANC government, and it is the Party that takes the accolades and the bric-bats. How has the ANC fared in government? We should assess our performance objectively and honestly.

On the credit side, we can point to the fact that all the previous laws that discriminated adversely against the black peoples of the country have disappeared. We have promulgated new laws, established values that underline democracy, race and gender equality, transparency. We have phased in a new society in which the African is taking his/her place in business management, in corporate directorates, and in government at all levels. The enrolment of African students in institutions of higher learning has increased significantly, more African pupils are at school than ever before, school feeding schemes are in place, health services are expanding, there is a far better delivery of water and electricity, and rural outposts ignored in the past, are now being outreached.

Short on Delivery

But with all this, our delivery has not met the expectations of our people. When people from the ground raise their voices and we pause to listen, we hear stories like the following:

"I was born in the Tshaneni area under the tribal authority in the magisterial area of Ubombo. The poor but struggling people of this community had to dig down their empty pockets to build the only school in the area - the Tshaneni Combined Primary School."

"We have no secondary school. When a child passes Grade 7 (Std 5), he or she has to leave home and rent a room. This compounds problems because most kids don't make it to matric, girls often become teenage mothers, boys in such unsupervised conditions end up swimming in a pool of liquor and become loose cannons." "I call on the education ministry to get their act together and help us in our initiative to build a secondary school. Without it, we will continue to be a source of cheap, unskilled labour long after our hard-earned democracy."

"The second most pressing issue is that of roads and transport. Despite being 12 kilometres from the nearest town, we travel 30 kilometres to get to it'. A local bus company turned down the request to serve the area because the road does not go among the people; it was created for white farms and tourists to the Mkuze Game Reserve, not for us. We need our own road."

"We thank the Independent Development Trust for providing us with funds to build a clinic, but this is not enough as the clinic is only operational once a week."

Delivery and the Destitute

Our new government is a people's government, yet the vast majority of South Africans, particularly the African people and more specifically, rural Africans, have had practically no deliveries made to them. There is much talk of deliveries of water and electricity, but when viewed against the vast sectors of our population who continue to remain deprived of these most basic amenities, the deliveries appear more token than real: they are to be found in pockets rather than expansively in the highly depressed areas. Those homelands that were "excised" from South Africa and therefore not covered by some of the services available in the Nationalist Republic, still remain deprived of these services. For instance the former homelands, that is, our rural areas have no access to legal aid. Bearing in mind that these areas are predominantly peopled with women, the men moving out to the cities, the women being left to protect the huts and the land, it is the women who suffer the deprivations. They suffer too, the isolation of the rural areas from centres of knowledge and from technology.

Restitution of Land

The African people are even now restricted to the reserves demarcated by the colonialists. While the Land Commission and Land Claims Court deal with restituting land taken away during the apartheid era, they have no jurisdiction over land taken away prior to that era. The Bill of Rights protects property thus privatised. The result is that the only land available to the vast majority of Africans is land that remain under tribal tenure. Such land is held in trusteeship by the amakosi, who rarely allocate land to women.

Research shows that where progressive amakosi have allocated land to women, their male neighbours have objected and made their lives difficult.

We will never regain our lost African peasantry so long as our rural Africans remain deprived of arable land fenced-off as private property and left unused by white farmers, simply to be passed on to their heirs as their fiefdoms.

Delivery to Women - Women's access to Freedom and Democracy

To access resources, one has firstly to know that they are available, and secondly know how to access them. This in turn demands literacy and accessibility to the media. The vast majority of our population are speakers of African languages -Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho; there is very little media communication in these languages. Moreover, the larger majority of our population do not have the means to access the media, either because they cannot afford it, or they are illiterate.

Our African women form the bulk of our oppressed, illiterate and semi-literate. They are most in need of the freedom and democracy promised them in the constitution; at the same time they are the least able to access that freedom and democracy. they remain by and large ignorant of their rights and even when awareness touches them, they don't know how to claim their rights - how would they access a Land Claims Court, or the Human Rights Commission, or Gender Commission? There would be the question of finding the right people, of making arrangements about the family during their absence, of taking leave from work.

On the face of it, our new government has set up a multiplicity of safeguards against gender discrimination. Each government department has a gender focal point, there is an office on the status of women, there is the Gender Commission, we are a signatory to the UN initiated commitment to end domination against women [CEDAW]. In reality, very little, if anything, of these has facilities filtered through to the rank and file of our women.

The ANCWL will have to work out an urgent plan of action in this direction in co-operation with the government and other organisations in the field.

A serious injustice prevails in the army, vis-a-vis women members of the forces, especially those drawn from MK, most of whom remain unranked and thereby unfairly discriminated against.

Violence against Women

Violence has become a chronic factor in our lives. Now that political violence is settling down, criminal violence is taking over. There is a public uproar against the non-performance of the police and the judiciary. The people have lost faith in their ability to protect them. They are arming themselves and those who are able to, are forming their own protective units.

Impoverished women, and African women in particular, are the most exposed to violence. They have neither the capacity to arm themselves, nor to form defensive units. Crime against women is soaring. Recent figures show that while reported cases of rape have gone up to 34 000 per annum, that of murder has gone down to 19000. As many cases of rape escape reporting as are reported. Apart from rape, other forms of physical attacks on women, battering and beating are also on the increase. How may women feel safe? Studies have revealed that where there is public outrage, where pressure groups operate, where rape courts are set up, the incidence of violence against women declines. It is not sufficient to sympathise with victims of violence: urgent action needs to be mobilised on a national scale. This is something the government has yet to do, despite the large numbers of women in our legislatures.

Women's Rights under Traditional Government

We of the ANCWL support the contribution of traditional government. That government represents our Africanness. Reposed in that institution is our history, our custom, our lore, our indigenous technology, our culture, our philosophy and our religion. We welcome the recent formation of the House of Amakosi. Traditionally, the amakosi lived close to their people, in democratic consultation with them, their material standard of living not vastly different from that of their subjects. They did not set themselves up in pomp and glory apart from their people, as European and Asian kings. Our amakosi should replicate the values of their forebears, rather than attempt to set themselves up as royalty and make huge inroads into state coffers as is happening in some regions.

The amakosi should also bear in mind that much of the domination and repression of women that continues under tribal law is due to colonial distortions. The amakosi have a responsibility to raise the status of the women in their constituencies in line with the Bill of Rights, and ensure that women have representations on their Councils, that there are also women amakosi.

Sunset Clause

Our problems in making effective deliveries are two-fold: insufficient funds and our continued dependence on the civil service we inherited from the womb of apartheid. This has resulted in a serious disjunction between legislation and delivery. We are burdened with a bureaucracy trained in racist norms and racist deliveries. The incumbents of that bureaucracy finds it very difficult to understand the dynamics of black needs, more specifically the needs of African women. This hampers delivery both in pace and content, leaving our black constituencies unfulfilled and dissatisfied. Our anti-apartheid activists of yesterday, now in government, have been forced to accommodate to that bureaucracy. Their voice of protest and discontent appears to have become considerably stilled as they have knuckled down to a climate of tolerance. After all, one of the conditions of our transition into our new democracy was the acceptance of the Sunset Clause. The result is that our commitment to reconciliation often overrides our commitment to achieving equality in the redistribution of our resources.

Affirmative Action

While accepting the apartheid bureaucracy, we also undertook to improve the race and gender balance in all appointments. This has created considerable tension. One cannot keep in place the old civil service made up by and large of male Afrikaner and simultaneously reform its composition. The solution has been to offer handsome retrenchment packages which have not only been a serious drain on our coffers, but have also had disastrous results in some departments, in particular the education, where huge state investments in highly trained teachers has been lost in one feat swoop.

Retrenchment has often meant that those with greater competence have been the first to go, leaving the bureaucracy in the hands of the less competent, both in terms of the old and new recruits. Gender equality has often meant more jobs for white women, black women benefiting little in the process.

Too much Government · Too large a gravy train

Civil society does not like too much government. Firstly, it is taxed to maintain it and secondly it feels too controlled by it. Our governmental structure is large, primarily because we have had to put in place, courts and commissions to ensure an adequate outreach of our new democracy. Three years is not sufficient to design, to appoint and to get new structures into action. Some of our commissions and statutory bodies have only very recently become operative, others are still in the process of being established. Delivery is thus not evident. In the meanwhile, expectations have been built up in civil society, and when these are not met, there is frustration and accusations of delayed delivery or non-delivery, and of gravy trains.

The other great responsibility we carry is that of reparations to the victims of apartheid. Both the truth Commission end the Land Claims Courts will become more and more involved in recommendations in this direction. Neither the volume of these demands nor the government's capacity to meet them have as yet been calculated.

Women in Government

We have one of the highest representation of women in parliament in the world and women are apparent at all levels of government; has this made a difference to the lives of women in civil society? Are they securer? Safer? Less dominated by men? More empowered?

We pledge our support to our parent body, the ANC and to the ANC Youth League. We will remain ever dedicated to the leadership so long as the leadership remains true to the principles of the ANC. We have a responsibility to the people, to civil society, and we pledge ourselves to fulfil that responsibility.

We have a mammoth task to accomplish in the 21st Century. We need resources to accomplish it. Though the women of our country constitute 53% of our population, they consume a very small proportion of the national budget and while the ANC is committed to gender equality, the ANCWL has never been allocated anything near the funds it needs. In the past, the ANC was run primarily on the voluntary efforts of members with no consideration for material payment. That time has passed. The ANC itself has introduced a culture of payment and administers a massive paid machinery. The League must be allocated an empowering budget.

Forward into the 21st Century!

Forward into the democracy we claim as our heritage!