Women In Politics
Friday 20th January 2006

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has broken the glass ceiling and joined what was an all-men club. Women all over the continent cheered when they heard the results. It’s been a long wait. Now, surely, the floodgates will be opened and women will finally begin to be represented equally throughout politics and government, in line with their skills and their rights.

Yet the women who are making it are a tiny minority of a middle-class elite, who are themselves a tiny minority of Africa’s women. Gender inequality and oppression are still widespread in the vast majority of settings, whether at home, in the field or in the workplace. At least three women are currently holding vice-presidential posts (in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Burundi) and two are prime ministers (in Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe).

Johnson-Sirleaf attributes her victory in part to the efforts of the feminist movement, and it can expect good things from her as she gets into her stride.

She makes the point that much of the “Beijing Platform” – the programme of action that came out of the United Nations’ international women’s conference in 1995 – has never been implemented in African countries.

She intends to use her new-found power in Liberia to change that.

In October, Togo became the 15th African nation to ratify the African Union (AU) protocol on women’s rights. It was a key milestone. Not only are the signatories under an obligation to align their domestic laws with the protocol, but with 15 countries signed up, the protocol acquires force in international law.

Johnson-Sirleaf is in a good position to lobby other members of Africa’s presidential club to ratify the protocol.

One tool that was used to ensure the representation of women in the AU is affirmative action. That’s how the AU’s highest body, its Commission, comes to be 50 per cent female. But some are arguing that the arrival of women in the top positions of state in Africa makes affirmative action redundant –the need for quotas is past.

They point to Rwanda’s parliament, which has the highest proportion of women in the world with almost 49 per cent. South Africa, Mozambique and Burundi each boast over 30 per cent.

But in most of Africa, women continue to be dismally under-represented in parliament. And gender activists would respond that the enormous struggle that women face to reach the top only confirms that it is time to speed up the process.

Johnson-Sirleaf says she had hoped Liberia would at least make the 30 per cent level in parliament, while women in Uganda’s governing National Resistance Movement party go further.

Rather than relying on positive policies from above, they want the rules of the game changed by having the party enshrine a quota of 40 per cent of leadership positions for a woman and guarantee the vice-president’s job to a woman.

One woman who is probably having along, hard think after the Johnson-Sirleaf victory is Edith Nawakwi, Zambia’s former finance minister and now presidential hopeful with her sights set on this year’s poll.

Reportedly dismissive of the feminist movement in the past, she is now apparently softening her stance, given her need for the women’s vote.

A writer in the Times of Zambia noted that as a single woman in former President Frederick Chiluba’s government, Nawakwi suffered from male jibes that she couldn’t be a real woman without a husband. Now they doubt whether a married woman can deliver in the nation’s top job. Nawakwi may find that the support of women is more consistent and focussed on the issues than that of male commentators.

(Culled from BBC FOCUS ON AFRICA MAGAZINE)