South Africa

Victoria Zanele KaMagwaza-Msibi admits she is no angel. But for 30 years she’s navigated through South Africa’s tough political landscape, mainly as a member of a male-dominated party, and now as the leader of her own political party.

''I'm not an angel. I haven't forgotten. It left pain in my heart to leave a party that I invested 30 years of (my) life in. But I have tried to channel that pain into a constructive realm. I insist on the idea that democracy and women’s advancement must be promoted within a political organisation," KaMagwaza- Msibi says.

South Africans will take to the polls on May 18 to vote in the country’s fourth local government elections but women’s issues are glaringly absent from many of the party manifestos, observers say. Janine Hicks from the Commission on Gender Equality says that none of the five major parties have mainstreamed the issue of gender. "We have looked at a sample of party manifestos and we did a scan and analysis and in the main parties have not mainstreamed gender in their manifestos. Their main focus seems to be on service delivery," she says.

Political parties should be forced, through changes in legislation, to bring more women into government. This is the call from the Commission on Gender Equality (CGE) after the country’s local government election saw only 17.25 percent of women elected as councilors out of the total number of candidates standing in the election. Of the candidates running for election, only 37 percent were women.

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From June 9 to 10 iKNOW Politics participated to the workshop on the analysis of political parties’ policy documents from a gender perspective.