South African leader Thabo Mbeki, in his state of the nation address at the opening of parliament in Cape Town last Friday, focused on plans to support government’s accelerated and shared growth initiative (Asgi), aimed at boosting economic growth and job creation. But Mohau Pheko and Lebohang Pheko, from the Gender & Trade Network in Africa, take Mbeki to task for failing to adequately consider the country’s women in his latest plans to fast-track growth.

Dear Mr. President Thabo Mbeki,

You have missed a great opportunity in the State of the Nation Address to articulate the problems confronting the women of South Africa. Why is it after 50 years of contributing to resistance, opinions, wisdoms and economic growth in this country when you mention us in your speeches we are merely lumped together with the disabled who should also take exception to this patronising marginalisation.

Since this is the 50th year that women celebrate their tremendous contribution to this country, it is worth using it to sum up what the last 12 years have been like in terms of economic policy. In adopting a market led macroeconomic strategy, we should tell you that the relationship between women, markets and the state has been increasingly complex. The market in the past 12 years has not acted in the interest of women nor has the state always acted in the interests of women. This has resulted in a rather disconnected policy framework which has failed to accurately evaluate the realities of women’s lives which are controlled through the interaction of economic, political, social and cultural forces based on class, gender and race. The policy framework has also failed to evaluate women’s role in social reproduction and how they maintain life within the family and communities they live in.

It is deplorable that women in the South Africa’s policy framework are still treated as dependents and instruments for family survival or state objectives. South Africa has long neglected gender as a category in the economic analysis of poverty, growth, inequality and the concentration of wealth. The frameworks suggested for poverty eradication by 2014 do not empower the majority of women in their own right. They tend to view women from a skewed perspective of ‘neediness’ rather than recognizing women’s wisdom, intellect, and achievements.

More importantly the assumptions in your Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA) do not spell out how the women of this country stand to benefit from this plan. The latest labour survey still reports that women are the most unemployed in the country. The most recent United Nations Human Development Report for South Africa confirms that women are still the poorest in our country and this trend is downward. In ASGISA, who are you accelerating growth for? How will you ensure that women qualitatively and quantitatively share in this growth? What type of growth are you talking about? The pattern of growth is as important as the rate of growth. Some growth patterns even if they increase per capita income and consumption may in the long run be detrimental to women as we have experienced in the current neo liberal framework. Economic growth without a distribution mechanism is inimical to women. Economic growth that depends on cuts in public expenditure, productivity, on labour deregulation are a danger to women in this country. Growth patterns or resource allocation that do not meaningfully integrate women, or result in growth equity are all costly to the women of this nation.

Many of your policy makers and public servants do not understand that women experience poverty differently from men due to gender inequalities resulting in different access to entitlements, economic leverage and social advancement. Women are subjected to the intergenerational transfer of poverty. Women have fewer economic resources, less access to labour markets. They shoulder greater responsibilities at the household level and many have restrictions on their mobility. These interlocking disadvantages result in women having less time to access your expanded works programme and less power to negotiate opportunities. How will ASGISA respond?

Gender equity is the power relationship that enables men and women to have equal access to the scarce and valued resources of their society. Within asymmetrical, unequal power relations at the household level women are the least powerful. These asymmetries include employment, education, wages, personal autonomy, healthcare, leisure and decision-making. The over weaning posture and support given to the male private sector has not been extended to women in the same way. Business and Economic Commissions set up to advise the President are still dominated by males. Trading enterprises have put severe limitations on market opportunities for many impoverished women and has allocated to them the nooks and crevices. The issue is not just the quantity of market opportunities it is also the quality. Many women work in the informal market under conditions of insecurity, are subjected to police harassment and exploitation and have little bargaining power and freedom to organize. At the same time, the commercialization of common property and cutbacks and privatization of healthcare and education have deprived women in poverty of access to affordable resources to improve their conditions. To what extent does ASGISA address these issues and how will it act as a catalyst in changing these critical dimensions?

The growth process suggested in ASGISA will in fact create new patterns of poverty deprivation for women because the issues that create inequality have been embedded and reproduced in ASGISA. In our country, women are responsible for social reproduction and daily household management. Since ASGISA is dependent on labour flexibility, inadvertently, women are the ones who will pay the cost by having to devise coping and survival strategies when household incomes fall and prices rise.

When food prices increase, when user charges for water, healthcare, electricity, and education are introduced and increased, the access of women to these services is affected, especially in a situation of poverty. There has been the casualisation of women’s work to lower unit labour cost, not just in the informal sector but also in the formal sector in terms of outsourcing or subcontracting arrangements. What is happening is that economic growth will depend on increased efficiency becoming a transfer cost subsidized by women from the paid economy to the unpaid work of women at the household level. That second economy you keep talking about consists of millions of women who subsidise the first economy without any fruits of growth accruing to them. Women especially in the rural and peri-urban areas are concentrated in the agricultural sector and the informal sector where the rate of growth and the potential for growth is relatively low to non-existent. In the industrial sectors women are concentrated in the unskilled or semi-skilled categories and have limited access to opportunities and benefits of economic development and growth. Is ASGISA a sufficient tool for standing up to these challenges?

The role of the State in distributing resources along gender, class and race lines to ensure access is critical if there is to be any meaningful developmental benefit for women. These social constructs and lived realties are essential mediating factors. The State is not a private company but a nation requiring government intervention to enable social cohesion, people participation and conscious distribution of the fruits of growth.

* Mohau Pheko and Lebohang Pheko are with the Gender & Trade Network in Africa, which works on international trade providing macroeconomic, trade, and policy literacy on the Africa continent. It works in 18 countries and is linked to the International Gender & Trade Network based in Brazil. Contact 082 6702505/084 881 9327

* Please send comments to

The sixth ministerial of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) wrapped up just before Christmas, but the results were anything but a present for Africa. The general consensus on the outcome was that a ‘development package’ failed to obscure losses in the areas of services, agriculture and export subsidies. In this article, Mohau Pheko and Liepollo Lebohang Pheko from the Gender & Trade Network in Africa, argue that Hong Kong will be remembered for creating an anti-development platform for Africa and the African people, especially women.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) evokes a complex game at a casino. Bets are placed, teams are formed and reformed. The G90, G33, G20, NAMA 11 and of course the quads comprising the richest countries of the US, EU, Canada and Japan all line up. Typical of negotiations between rich and poor countries, the rules of the game shift according to the interests of the rich players who make the rules as they go along. In the end the rich industrial nations scheming and reverting to their old bag of tricks like ‘aid for trade’, extract even more concessions from poor African countries who have once again lost the game.

Much time in Hong Kong was spent by rich nations plotting their divide and conquer ‘development’ packages. Yet, even the so-called ‘development’ package was a case of romance without finance, empty, pathetic and premised on the notion of loans to further indebt poor African countries. The least developed countries came under attack as threatening to collapse the summit if they refused their suitors efforts at romancing them by increasing their debt in a take-it-or-leave-it assistance package.

Even the rare boldness of African parliamentarians earlier in the week in insisting that ‘the development concerns in all aspects of negotiations that have been raised by African Members be addressed as an integral part of the negotiations’, was ignored. African trade ministers thought otherwise and endorsed the final text with all its flaws. After six days of acrimonious negotiations, everyone including the unholy trio of the EU, US and Pascal Lamy, the WTO director-general, knows that a multitude of serious problems facing the WTO were papered over to avoid a third collapse and yet another visit to the intensive care unit. The concluded negotiations are a clear indication that the ‘free trade’ system is manifestly hypocritical, inconsistent, and ineffective for African women in particular. The WTO talks in Hong Kong have vividly highlighted these contradictions.

We cannot blame the rich countries alone; they needed to co-opt some countries from the global south to succeed in spinning a deceptive deal. The culprits emerge as the G-20 countries led by countries with large emerging economies such as Brazil, India, China, Pakistan and South Africa. The G-20 headed by Brazil’s Celso Amorin and India’s Kamal Nath have led the developing countries down the garden path in exchange for some market access in agriculture for Brazil and services outsourcing for India. The result of this is that developing countries will be forced to swallow the bitter pill of aggressive services market access. This will force African countries to provide foreign investors with the same rights as local suppliers in areas like water. This is an attack on public services that women depend upon for their families. For South Africa this will work against efforts towards broad-based BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) and women’s economic empowerment with these groups having to compete with foreign investors for tenders in the services sectors.

Through the adoption of a Swiss formula on Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA), African countries will be forced to undertake drastic cuts in their industrial tariffs. This will potentially lead to the further collapse of local industries, de-industrialisation and massive job losses in mining, fishing and manufacturing and will wipe out women’s home-based industries, displacing local producers.

In the area of agriculture, Africa’s critical interests have been ignored. The end date of 2013 for the elimination of export subsidies, which amounted to three billion euros, looses significance when compared to the damage that African farmers will endure by domestic support measures which amount to 55 billion euros. It is clear that the rich countries, in particular the US and EU, found an escape route on this sticking point. The losers are African women who will be displaced by companies like Monsanto who produce genetically modified seeds and are creating a food security crisis for the African world.

The resistance of countries such as the G90 (mostly developing countries), Venezuela and Cuba were systematically thwarted by immense pressure from the rich nations. What is clear now is that the use of the Doha Development Round was a smokescreen by rich countries to force developing countries to comply with their WTO commitment to open up their markets, even if this was not compatible with national development goals. The ideological imperative of free trade is like a moral prescription of errant religious leaders – do as I say, not as I do. When African countries made demands for special treatment, they were regarded as charity cases by wealthy countries. The rich countries also intimidated developing countries by asserting that they have only two options – meet the challenge of adapting to trade liberalisation or retreat into the dark past of protectionism. This is a false dichotomy. The real dichotomy is the power play between development and the unequal rules of free trade as defined by the rich countries.

Instead of Hong Kong becoming a milestone towards achieving the much-lauded development round, it will be remembered as creating an anti-development platform for Africa and the African people. The economic gains promised when the WTO was launched 11 years ago never materialised and the economic conditions for the majority of African people has deteriorated. It reminds one of that old Billie Holiday song “them that’s got shall get, them that’s not shall lose”.

A recent World Bank study shows that poor nations will be the net looser if the current Doha agenda is continued. It is incredibly cynical - even by WTO standards - to try and label these negotiations as pro-development. Included as net losers are Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and most of the Middle Eastern countries. A careful read of the Hong Kong Ministerial text shows that despite days of hype about development being at the centre of the Doha agenda, in reality, Africa has been mortgaged to subsidise the economic future of rich industrial countries.

* The writers are members of the Secretariat for the Gender & Trade Network in Africa based in Johannesburg. GENTA participated at the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference.

* Please send comments to [email protected]