South Africa

South Africa has soared to third place, behind Rwanda and Sweden, in global rankings on women representation in Parliament after last week's elections, a report released by Gender Links on Tuesday has revealed. Before the elections the country was sitting at number 17 on the global rankings and this is set to improve dramatically with the anticipated increase in women representation in the new Parliament.
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South Africa's newly elected president Jacob Zuma has appointed 14 women ministers with 12 as deputies. According to media reports in the country, Zuma made sweeping changes to the cabinet making almost half of the ministers he announced on Sunday.
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Women are still strikingly underrepresented in the world’s parliaments: their share of representatives is less than a fifth. However, the situation shows signs of progress in developing countries. Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, former member of the South African liberation movement, encourages women to put up as candidates.

Chief electoral officer Pansy Tlakula called on Friday for a quota system to improve women's representation in the public and private sector. She said the Independent Electoral Commission was not happy with the number of women candidates in local government elections to be held on May 18. Out of 53,000 candidates only 37 percent are women.

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Since the first democratic elections in 1994, women representation in Parliament has soared, owing partly to the ruling party's 50/50 principle at national and provincial spheres of government. After the 2009 elections, women’s representation in cabinet increased from 34 percent to 43 percent, a nine percent increase, and the country saw the accession of five women to the positions of premier in the country's nine provinces.

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.