A woman president would be as compromised as a man
Female candidates might undergo different scrutiny but the only thing that counts in the ANC leadership stakes is access to state assets and perks, writes Sisonke Msimang
WHENEVER I am asked whether South Africa is ready for a woman president, my default response is to pose another question: Can the country survive another man at the helm?
Usually people chuckle nervously, but they get the point. Women in leadership are under far more scrutiny than men and it is almost always on the basis of their gender.
Men’s leadership is so taken for granted that when a man turns out to be a disastrous president, nobody says: “You see, men just aren’t ready to balance the demands of work and play; we should never have given them the right to make decisions.”
Now that the ANC Women’s League has announced it is ready to put forward a woman candidate, we are likely to hear about their children and their husbands, and how they are both mothers and leaders and use emotional intelligence.
When it comes to the men in the race, there will be no such discussion. The media will focus on what their leadership will mean for the country in economic terms and whether they can get the party back on the right footing.
Given the state of the ruling party, however, the only question that really matters when assessing potential presidential candidates is one that seeks to find out to which faction they belong. The ANC is likely to be the winner of the next election. Because of this, and because the ANC has the most progressive gender policies in the political landscape, the prospects of a woman president emerging from elsewhere are slim. Thus the state of the ANC is crucial to this debate.
As the recent elective conferences of both the women’s league and the ANC Youth League show, the ANC is riven with conflict, and, sadly, little of it is ideological. The battle lines are drawn firmly around personal interests and access to commercial opportunities. The factions are intricate and complex and therefore divisive in ways that do not lend themselves easily to political analysis.
Superimposing a logical gender analysis onto a political frame that is resistant to logic is frustrating and distracting, and misses the point entirely. Too many commentators looking at the gender question ignore the politics — a fundamental mistake.
At the moment, the only thing that matters in the leadership stakes is power. The meaning of the women’s league has changed fundamentally as the bonds between the league and other social structures have loosened and as social movements in general have begun to decline. Trade unions are under duress, Cosatu is in free fall, and the South African Council of Churches is in dire straits.
The NGO sector, on the one hand, has become increasingly depoliti- IF THE HAT FITS: Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma at the ANC Women’s League national conference, held in Irene, Pretoria, last month. Dlamini-Zuma has been spoken of as a potential ANC president and thus the likely future president of South Africa cised and, on the other, is seen as an enemy of the state. Each of these groupings used to have strong links to the women’s league. They gave it strength and legitimacy within the ANC. That base no longer exists.
Furthermore, the branches — which still comprise mainly working-class women — are in a mess. The administrative processes related to branch registration and closure, as well as to the selection of delegates to attend regional and provincial conferences, are open to manipulation and abuse.
In other words, the entire system that is used to perpetuate the party is rotten in ways not easily fixed.
Debating whether or not a woman should preside over a party that is so fundamentally compromised feels a little bit like fiddling while Rome burns.
Around the world, research indicates that women who successfully run for political office are almost always nominated and supported by women’s caucuses in established political parties. These women win because they know power brokers and have become influential themselves. In this way, successful women politicians are exactly like successful men politicians: they know how to play the game.
Despite all this, some might argue that having a woman president might be important for symbolic reasons. It would show the world we are a country that respects its women.
Except that having a woman president would have no substantive effect on the lives of women and girls: it won’t change the gender pay gap or stop the murders of lesbians or increase the number of black women in private sector management jobs above the current rate of only 5%. I am sceptical of investing too much in symbolic gestures when South African women need concrete actions that will change their daily lives.
There can be no question that the deeply undemocratic process that resulted in the installation of Collen Maine as the president of the youth league is symptomatic of the larger malaise afflicting the ANC. Similarly, the disturbing distortions of ANC processes that were on display both in Polokwane and Mangaung, and which impoverished democracy, speak to larger ructions in the ruling party.
It is clear that having a woman president in the next elections is neither here nor there. Clearly, quality, questions of gender and rights and so on are peripheral concerns in contemporary leadership contests. The battle to control access to state assets seems to have superseded the battle of ideas about what must be done to improve the lives of South Africans.
The women’s league itself is deeply embroiled in the infighting that is propelling the ANC into an unknown future, so there is little chance that any of the women whose names have been put forward — regardless of their merits — would be able to get any work done even if by some miracle they were not caught up in one or other turf war. As things stand today, no good candidate— of any gender -— can emerge from this miasma.
It is abundantly clear that South Africa can neither survive another rudderless man serving as No 1, nor can it afford to be led by a party hack who just so happens to be a woman.
In both the public and the private sphere, South Africa remains a nation that in its actions at least is committed to battering, abusing and humiliating women. A president won’t change that; only a legion of newer, younger leaders can turn the ship around.
Msimang is a writer and commentator. She can be found @sisonkemsimang
It is clear that having a woman president in the next elections is neither here nor there As things stand today, no good candidate — of any gender — can emerge from this miasma
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