NOBUNTU HLAZO-WEBSTER: State is complicit in keeping women on the margins

Black women remain the most disadvantaged group in SA society, with only 30% of African women engaged in formal economic sector activities.

In 2020, the National Status Report on BBBEE (B-BBBEE) national trends illustrated how women in the economy, in management control and on the ownership scorecard, are still far below acceptable levels in terms of the companies’ agenda of inclusion. The majority of women still do not sit in company boards where decisions and votes are made. This is evident even where they have 50% shareholding or more.

All of the above is from a speech by deputy trade, industry & competition minister Nomalungelo Gina in September last year at a   discussion themed “Mainstreaming Women’s Economic Empowerment through B-BBEE” in Pretoria. The discussion was refreshingly honest, yet the recent budget speech made little mention of tangible efforts to increase the meaningful participation by black women in the economy. 

One of the reasons finance minister Enoch Godongwana has a perennially difficult task in balancing the books is that we have a state that continues to exclude the majority of its people — women — from the economy. That means instead of the state making efforts to empower women and allow them to contribute to the fiscus, government would rather tell untruths about what it is doing for the empowerment of women.

The most recent lie was repeated in the state of the nation address, where President Cyril Ramaphosa created the impression his government was serious about the economic empowerment of women and their advancement in the workplace. “We have introduced laws and undertaken programmes to enable black South Africans and women to advance in the workplace, to become owners and managers, to acquire land and build up assets,” he said, one of seven times he mentioned women in his speech.

Elsewhere in the speech he mentioned that “around R21bn was dedicated over the medium term to the implementation of the six pillars of the plan, including the economic empowerment of women”. The president also mentioned that his government would focus on “the empowerment of black and women South Africans” among other cut-and-paste slogans he and the ANC government have made in the past three decades.

All of this sounds good, and it would have been great if the president had a track record of saying what he means and meaning what he says. In a virtual address to mark Women’s Day in 2020 Ramaphosa announced the government planned to expand women’s access to economic opportunities by setting aside 40% of public procurement for women-owned businesses.

Big talk, little action

Excited by this development, Chapter 9 institution the Commission for Gender Equality checked the progress of this lofty ideal and how state departments at national and provincial levels were implementing the president’s bold promise in a report, “A Promise Without Commitment: Overview of State Compliance with President’s 40% Procurement Allocation”. As it turned out, the president’s promise was hot air; at all levels the state wasn’t implementing the promised procurement suggested by the president.

The commission found that “the provincial spending range on women-owned businesses is largely between 0% and 5% (with few exceptions) of the total spend, and therefore the government is failing dismally at promoting economic opportunities for women-owned businesses through procurement processes”.

I said above that the president “suggested” procurement changes advisedly, because one of the main reasons for non-implementation is that it’s still not state policy. According to the Commission for Gender Equality, there is no draft policy and no clear legislative framework to guide the country’s procurement processes towards achieving Ramaphosa’s target.

The ANC-led government measures its success by how well it acts out its damsel-in-distress syndrome, as outlined by how the state had done in rescuing the president’s imaginary Tintswalo from the pernicious effects of the very same government.

Whereas any and every caring state should have a suitably robust social services net for those who need it, the state should be built around gradually reducing the number of those who need such services and thus give those who do need them enough to help them stave off the wolf at their door.

By failing to implement laws that would empower women, the ANC government seeks to keep women in the margins of the economy. In other words, the state seeks to fundamentally keep the pre-1994 status quo.

Apartheid, it should always be borne in mind, was not merely about segregating blacks and whites. It was also about keeping women out of decision-making positions. Apartheid was therefore as much about racism as it was about sexism. It was about a political and economic hierarchy where white, heterosexual men enjoyed the most of what the state could offer with the rest of the population catching the crumbs that fell from the highest rung down to the lowest occupied by black women.

Shirking commitments

The failure to ensure policies are in place to economically empower women are also at odds with the country’s international commitments — including the AU declaration and the Beijing Declaration. The economic empowerment of women is therefore a necessary policy requirement to correct the wrongs of the racial patriarchy that SA was by law and custom before 1994, and hold democratic SA to its word with regard to international commitments.

Failure to have these policies is to keep women, and therefore the country itself, in the pre-1994 era. Empowerment must be gender defined and its progress measured. It is not enough to generically speak of black participation in the economy without breaking this down to indicate the number or percentage of black women on that scorecard.

The economic empowerment of women is necessary for families and communities. A 2021 study found that of the nearly 18-million households in the country, some 7.6-million were headed by women. To empower is therefore to push back against accepting as normal that successive generations of women and their daughters will end up as cashiers, domestic workers, security guards and petrol attendants, if they are lucky.

Keeping women economically disempowered is also physically dangerous for them. Much sexual and physical violence against women has been traced back to them being in relationships where they or their children are financially or materially dependent on their abusive partners and therefore cannot leave the relationship or the home.

The commission’s report charitably states that “it is clear from the findings that the president’s announcement was driven by good intentions”. However, the fact of the matter is that the empowerment of women in every area of social, economic and political life requires more than “good intentions”.

The urgency of the challenges facing women in this country, at home, at work, in business, corridors of state power and in the streets, requires that the state act intentionally and urgently. The responsibility to create the requisite conditions and laws lies squarely with the government. It isn’t helpful for the deputy minister to describe the problem when she has a seat at the table where different decisions can and must be made.

The women of SA deserve and demand better than meaningless statements from a president, his ministers and deputy ministers, uttered merely to get women’s attention. It is disrespectful, at the very least, and a mark of the indifference to the economic and gender quagmire our country is in.

• Hlazo-Webster, a former chair of the Businesswomen’s Association of SA, is Build One SA deputy leader.