Can protocols and legislation really be an effective weapon against gender discrimination? Janah Ncube examines the Southern African Development Community and contends that while law may not change a moral belief, it can stop a husband from beating his wife to pulp, penalize unfair employment practices, and punish rape. “Legislation has proved that with the state upholding it, social norms eventually conform to it if it is beneficial to all peoples.”

It is no longer business as usual in the SADC region for development and gender stakeholders. After representatives from SADC Member States in government and civil society, regional NGOs, inter-governmental bodies and SADC Secretariat met in Botswana in December 2005, they concluded that if any integration in the SADC region is to be successful, sustainable and achievable, it has to be gender based regional integration.

The Executive Secretary of the SADC Secretariat Dr. Tomaz Salamao urged SADC governments to facilitate the implementation of the SADC Gender programme to enable the gender equality and equity objective to be attained. The driving force behind this consultative conference was the head of the Gender Unit at the SADC Secretariat Mrs. Magdaline Mathiba-Madibela who had the foresight to lobby and push for an action plan. Thus the 5 year SADC Gender Based Regional Integration Strategic Implementation Framework (2006 – 2010) was developed by the 110 participants.

The SADC Gender and Development conference was held in the backdrop of a region that is currently facing increasing poverty with over 70% of the region’s population living below US$2 per day and 40% below US$1 (SADC 2003), severe drought, extremely high HIV/AIDS prevalence (of the world population living with HIV, 60% come from the SADC region and of this number, 57% are women), serious food insecurity, high unemployment and cross border economic migrants.

While the only country in the SADC region experiencing ‘active conflict’ is the DRC, Angola is still reeling from the immediate effects of conflict including the problem of landmines, which Zimbabwe and Mozambique among others are still dealing with. Poor infrastructural development at national level and within the region in terms of connecting SADC Member States to facilitate trade and other cross-border initiatives is another such limitation.

All these limitations and challenges overbearing SADC precipitate as problems for women at practical day in day out experiences. This is because of the gendered nature of allocation of roles and responsibilities in our societies both at primary level (in the family) and at secondary level (in the public space). When the state cannot provide for its citizens, women become the subsidizers of the state by providing for unrecognized and unrewarded skills and services. The drastic expenditure budget cuts on social expenditure by governments in the late 1980s to 1990s due to structural adjustment programs give such evidence. African countries saw the negative impact of SAPs through the increased burden of care and basic food provision being shifted from the state to women (Maramba, Olagbegi & Webanenou 1995).

Women in the region have been facing increased challenges, marginalization and appalling gender crimes - despite vigorous gender awareness campaigns, women’s empowerment policies, legislation and programs adopted at national level since Beijing and other much earlier processes. What also is unique about the SADC region with regards to dissipating typical gender stereotypes is that women’s emancipatory efforts in this region were evidenced by their active participation together with the men in our liberation struggles (Campbell 2003).

However basic human rights, human dignity and human freedoms for them are still contested and have to be implored for diplomatically from our Heads of States. As seen in slavery, colonialism and apartheid, denial of rights of any persons is a mere facilitation of fictitious justifications for their exploitation. Until January 2006, adult women of Swaziland were being denied the dignity of being legal entities. Up to today, adult women in Botswana who decide to marry cannot open a water utilities account without the substantiation of their husbands. The way women are still portrayed in our media as trivial, sexual, insignificant entities of course perpetuates their secondary status in our societies.

Gendered violence is rampant in the SADC region and the conspiracy of silence around it in our homes, in our communities and indeed within the law has seen it multiply and become even more reckless as it is stealthily inflicted with impunity. Some of this abuse includes sexual crimes against baby girls as young as 3 days old; rape of primary school girls by male teachers and headmasters; gang rapes in daylight and cold and bloody murders sold to the world as ‘passion killings’.

While SADC is generally perceived as a region ‘enjoying’ peace, there is no peace in ordinary women’s everyday lives as husbands and lovers who claim to love them beat, kick and plunder their bodies. Of course this is called ‘domestic violence’ and has been found rather difficult to ‘treat’ in the justice system as it is a ‘household’ affair. Of course what is not being admitted here is that this is a security threat on the person of the victimised woman and is a denial of dignity when an external entity can bruise and break her body parts without legal recourse (see UDHR 1948).

The gendered division of labour within the region has resulted in the trivialization and marginalization of women’s work and their economic activities, which is practiced through denial of ownership and impossible access to resources such as land and capital; the criminalization or non regulation of the informal sector and lastly the non-costing of women’s work despite their long manual work.

This further buttresses not just the secondary status of women but is one of the key reasons developing countries have remained stuck in the poverty rut (UNIFEM 2005). SADC’s priority is to address the poverty that is in our region and unless we wake up to the reality that we have exhausted our capacity to further develop and grow the economies of our region based on exclusion and exploitation of women, we will stay in this rut for generations to come. The equality and equity agenda is not just about improving the situation of women, it is about improving the situation of our families which ripples into improving our communities, industries, countries and the region. It is about Africa utilizing all of its human skills in appropriating its resources to the best of its peoples. It is about attaining Africa’s potential by Africans for Africans.

In 2003, SADC came up with the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP) to guide SADC policies, programmes and actions. The RISDP re-enforces the strategy of regional integration which Oyejide (2000) argues is the most basic ingredient for attaining high and sustainable economic growth. The task of building a regional community in light of inequalities amongst the member states in terms of development and economic status and indeed those inequalities inherited from the colonial and imperial legacies based on race, gender, class and so forth, requires courageous and capable leadership, skills and resources.

However in light of global trends and the influence of International Financial Institutions (IFI) in local economies of developing countries such as SADC Member States, including trade agreements that are continually being made on North-South differential agreements, integration also becomes about synergies, pooling resources together, widening export markets, and enhancing capacity of the region while negotiating and engaging on international platforms and indeed negotiating for progressions within the region itsself (see ADB Report 2000).

The RISDP also recognizes that greater equality between women and men contributes to both development and economic growth. In light of this, gender mainstreaming has been adopted by SADC as a strategy for ensuring that all SADC policies, programmes and activities take into consideration the fact that women and men, boys and girls are affected differently by macro and micro initiatives and policies due to the gendered nature of our societies. Such disparities that leave women worse off than men must be addressed to achieve the goal of gender equality and equity.

At SADC secretariat level, the Gender Unit (GU) has the task of ensuring that gender is mainstreamed in SADC policies and programmes while at national level Member States have set up National Gender Machineries (NGM) as institutions to do the same in all government structures and initiatives and also advance the empowerment of women. As Win (2005) points out, NGM have failed to achieve the conceptualized and intended gender justice which they promised. They instead became token entities to ‘shut women up’ as either departments in ministries or fully-fledged ministries with other issues lumped together with them such as community development, youth, children etc.

As the ministers of Gender in Africa observed during the Beijing +10 process in October 2004, NGM lack capacity, authority and resources to implement the enormous task of engendering all of government. A capacity assessment of NGM commissioned by the GU also pointed out that NGM have no clear mandates, are peripheral entities in government and are poorly resourced (see GU Needs Assessment Study 2004). Despite this, NGM still remain the most effective institutions to mainstream gender in governments if they address these limitations and adopt the Gender Management System as a strategy. (The Gender Management System (GMS) is a network of structures, mechanisms and processes put in place within an existing organization to guide, plan, monitor and evaluate the process of mainstreaming gender.)

Indeed many peripheral analyses of the gender inequality/discrimination problem blame women for perpetuating this phenomenon. What they fail to acknowledge is the power of the socialisation process which does not separate women from men in reinforcing the messages of superior males and subordinate females stereotypes in our societies (see Oakley 1985). However the greatest challenge with changing gender-based disempowerment is that it is about women who are engaged in personal/intimate relationships with men who evoke their discrimination.

The racial discrimination fight was easier because the “other” was disengaged and not connected to the “us”. However this struggle is about going against the wisdom of a father, the perceptions of a husband, the practices mother taught. So sometimes it seems to be an internal fight between being loyal to what one has always known and believed and what one sees to be the path to attaining their potential, freedoms and security. The progressions that we have attained through legislation and policy changes indeed give hope to women that the equality goal can and will be attained. This is why the Gender and Development Conference called for the upgrading of the SADC Declaration on Gender and Development (1997) and its addendum on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Children (1998) to a protocol. A protocol is a legally binding instrument which Member States will have to enforce. This protocol will incorporate all the targets of existing regional and international instruments and will at the same time incorporate existing issues which are highly impacting on the region such as HIV/AIDS and the trafficking of women for sex trade and other exploitations. Currently member states are in the process of consulting different stakeholders and mobilizing for support for the proposed protocol, targeted to be tabled before Heads of States at their next Summit in August 2006 in Lesotho.

While it is true that discrimination, exclusion and exploitation of women are moral issues that have been justified through traditional and religious interpretations and despite numerous progressive laws, they have continued to prevail and this has lead to myths that propagate ideas that protocols and legislation cannot solve these problems. Truth is, the law cannot change one’s interpretation of the Bible or one’s moral belief. However legislation has codified gender discrimination and to borrow from Martin Luther King Junior’s rationale on legislation (1968); legislation can regulate behaviour and keep a husband from beating his wife to pulp, legislation can penalize and consequently restrain an employer from paying women less than men for the same type of work and legislation can show men that they can not rape and get away with light penalties. Legislation has proved that with the state upholding it, social norms eventually conform to it if it is beneficial to all peoples.

The challenge for SADC is to move the SADC region from goodwill and commitments to implementation and tangible changes women can see in their daily lives. Member States can start by adopting, ratifying and domesticating the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. The rhetoric has to be replaced by budget allocations of at least 10% for women’s empowerment and gender related programs in each line ministry’s budgetary allocation. SADC needs to accelerate its pace on increasing women’s leadership in political and other decision-making processes. Current trends are too slow; we missed our target of 30% by 2005 and have not felt ashamed by it.

National Governments must strengthen the capacity of NGM by increasing resources, clout, access, skilled senior personnel and defining clear mandates for them. Women’s NGOs and NGM must discard mistrust and adopt the spirit of the conference resolutions of seeking ways of collaborating and sharing information to achieve national targets. Civil society must continue to mobilize and educate the peoples of the region on action areas and issues identified and prioritised for the next 5 years. The energies generated at the conference must be fanned into even greater momentum as more stakeholders in the region run with the agenda. The SADC Executive Secretary recently pointed out that without peace, all of SADC’s efforts to integrate the region are futile. Truth is they are doomed to fail unless meaningful gender conscious and pro-women paradigms are what inform the region’s developmental and economic growth agenda.

* Janah Ncube is Technical Advisor to the Gender
SADC Secretariat in Gaborone Botswana

* Please send comments to [email protected]

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