By Mwalimu George Ngwane
Introduction
Tomorrow 8th March 2007 marks the 30th anniversary of the international 
Women’s Day. Established in 1977 by the United Nations, this important day provides an opportunity to celebrate the progress made to advance women’s rights and to assess the challenges that remain. This year’s theme is “Ending Violence against Women: Action for Real Results" with the Cameroonised adaptation being “Violence against women, Break the silence, take action”. The theme reflects the forms of marginalization, discrimination, persecution, victimization and exclusion, women in Africa have experienced since the Beijing Conference of 1995 became a media-hyped benchmark.
Many International legal instruments on human rights prohibit discrimination against specific groups, in particular women. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), for example, obliges state parties to pursue by all appropriate means a policy of eliminating discrimination against women. It obliges state parties to take action against the social causes of women’s inequalities, and it calls for the elimination of laws, stereotypes and prejudices that impair women’s well-being. In the main, I have categorized gender-based violence into socio-cultural, socio-economic and social-political forms.
Socio-cultural form
This includes forms of violence that are entrenched in our traditional customs and cultural values systems in most part of Africa. Based on an indigenous cultural perception of governance and externalized cultural interpretations, socio-cultural forms of gender-based violence have had resistance from conservative traditionalists over the years. Paradoxically among these traditionalists are rural aged women who regard advocates of change as brainwashed female elite pandering to the ethos of globalization without recourse to historical dialectics. The traditionalists and “progressives” perceive socio-cultural construct of violence as a conflict between Afro-centric value system versus Eurocentric stereotypes, ritual initiations versus human right violation, culture versus torture and beneficial belief systems versus barbaric cultural practices. Some of these socio-cultural modes of violence include Female Genital Mutilation or Female Circumcision, domestic violence (spouse battering), property grabbing (inheritance deprivation), early forced marriages, female infanticide, son preference, dowry prices etc.
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is an age-old practice simply because it is customary. It involves the mutilation of the female genital organ as a rite of passage to womanhood, a way of combating female sex appetite and infidelity even if it has been argued that the practice imposes on women and the girl child a catalogue of health complications and untold psychological problems. Female Genital Mutilation is known to be practiced in at least 27 counties in Africa. A UN Report estimates that about 20 percent of women in Cameroon go through a form of FGM called Infibulation. For the past three years alone, about 600 women have been mutilated in Manyu division of the South West Province of Cameroon. The Logone and Chari region in the Far North Province also comes to sharp focus in this practice. It is therefore laudable that the Vice President of the National Assembly Mrs. Rose Abunaw has been leading a crusade with other female Parliamentarians in Cameroon to legislate against this practice. A civil society association called AFRICAphonie has just released a tele-film on FGM and other civil society groups continue engaging traditional and administrative opinion leaders in discussions on these socio-cultural forms of Gender-based violence in Africa.
Socio-economic form
This involves violence or persecution emanating from poor service delivery and biased resource allocation. Lack of adequate policies on health, education infrastructure and agriculture has affected the bulk of the population in Africa. And since 52 percent of this population constitute the women folk it has given rise to what is now called the “feminization of poverty”. By neglecting the agricultural sector, most African governments fail to improve the performance of the agro-food supply chains (farm to market roads, subsidized farm incentives, local consumption etc) and women who are largely concentrated in the rural areas become grossly marginalized. African governments have lost their economic sovereignty to the IMF and World Bank with the nefarious consequences being felt on women’s needs.
The role of the Bretton Wood institutions in stifling local economic space has resulted in the labour power of women being appropriated in the process of capital accumulation. Women constitute 60 percent of the labour force in agriculture in Africa. In specific country cases Niger’s women represent 97 percent of the labour force, Burkina Faso’s women represent 91percent and Cameroon’s women represent 93.5 percent of the labour force. How then does one expect the largest percentage of our agricultural labour force to yield enough produce it they are so disadvantaged? Infact even though women contribute up to 70 percent of their local and national economies, they receive less than one-tenth of the world’s income. Fortunately NGOs are providing income-generating activities and other financial services that benefit women.
Access to education by women still remains a great challenge with the result that it deprives them of information and economic independence. Two thirds of the World’s 960 million illiterate people are women. The literacy rate for the women in Niger is 7 percent while that of Burkina Faso stands at 9 percent.
Lack of affordable health care delivery systems, drinking water and sanitation especially in the rural sector constitutes institutional violence against women. The average maternal death in Africa per 100.000 stands at 880, with countries like Sierra Leone shooting up to 1800 and Rwanda at 1600. Cameron had recorded a relative drop in maternal death because of the favourable health policy meticulously pursued by the indefatigable Health Minister Olanguena Awono, Unfortunately taxes imposed on even patty business community (championed by women) compromises Cameroon’s economic policy based on national ownership. Ministries of Women’s Affairs have been created to cater for women rights and benefits in Africa, but budget allocation is a dismal failure when compared to that of the Ministry of Defence.
Socio-political form
This involves violence or discrimination resulting from unbalanced political representation and bad governance.
Women make up half of the world’s population yet they account for only 5 to 10 percent of formal leadership positions world wide. In Africa, 8 percent of women are in parliament and 7 percent in Ministerial leadership. In Sub Saharan Africa, representation of women in the Lower House, as of 2005, stood at 14.9 percent while that of the Senate was 14 percent. So far only two countries in Africa (Rwanda - 48% and South Africa – 30%) have hit the 30 percent target of women representation in political institutions as prescribed by the 1995 Beijing Conference. Seychelles with 27%, Mozambique with 25% and Namibia with 22% constitute the success story of affirmative action policy, women pressure groups carry out in Africa, to advance women representation in sites of political power.
None the less it has been advanced that the greatest strategy for creating women’s presence in politics is through Proportional Representation System or Quotas. There is the party informal quota that stipulates that 30 percent of the candidates on the party’s list must be women and there is the statutory quota or reserved seats for women enshrined into some national constitutions or national electoral laws-. This is the case for example in Uganda, Eritrea and Tanzania where 15 percent out of the 255 seats are reserved for women in the Parliament. In Zambia, a national policy on gender places the quota for representation for women in political structure at 30:70% ratio. In Cameroon, the Deputy Coordinator for the Good Governance Program, Mrs. Lydia Effimba tried in vain during the 2004 Presidential elections to convince parties to include women-friendly issues on their party programmes.
While this quota system enables women to break the patriarchal power, it is civil society groups that can pressurize women leaders to abandon the masculine model of predatory politics and seek to improve the quality of life for women and men. Hence capacity building forums on leadership politics, campaign skills, public speaking/communication skills and campaign support funds for women aspiring to political office are very vital. Having said this, the fundamental question is whether political participation results in the improvement in the quality of life for women and whether the quality of governance improves when women participate in politics. This depends on the definition women and especially feminists in development male of what is called “the Empowerment model”. The Empowerment model, according to Moser, seeks to identify power less in terms of domination over others and more in terms of the capacity women need to increase their own self-reliance and internal strength. Bad governance has led not only to social dislocation in most African countries but has inadvertently contributed to large scale protracted conflicts and wars that make Africa the open sore of the world. Statistics show that women are often the victims of these wars as they assume the status of refugees, sexually-abused victims and widows.
Conclusion
Gender roles have always been well defined and firmly entrenched in African traditional society. Beijing did not arrive to confront but to engage discussions on gender relations in the household and in the public sphere. African women voices would be resonant if women consider their male counterparts as partners rather than hurdles in the journey to women development. Women advocacy would remain more relevant if 8th March is seen not as an event but a project; the International Women’s Day would be meaningful if it is celebrated as a life-service balm needed to heal the wounds of all forms of marginalization including those that are women-specific.
Yes, 8th March would have justification if women commemorate the day as an introspective tool to assess the damage caused on women growth both by externalized bondage-hood created by others and internalized victim-hood created by women themselves. And so while global women commemorate 8th March as the International Women’s Day, let all African Women not forget that 31st July represents the Day of the African Woman as prescribed by the OAU/African Union. For indeed the mission of the African woman is two-pronged – advocating corrective mechanisms in the various institutionalized exclusionist and conspiracy practices of gender-based violence in Africa, and also seeking therapies to the cancer of African citizen-centred violence that has placed Africans at the bottom of the human development pyramid.
Recent Comments