Extract I heard them before I saw them. The media centre at the ANC's 54th national conference at Nasrec was pulsating after the announcement of the election results of the top six positions. Journalists were hammering out stories about the dramatic events leading to the crowning of Cyril Ramaphosa. Foreign correspondents gushed on international networks about the significance of “the rise of Nelson Mandela’s favoured successor”. Then there was a commotion at the door of the media centre and a gaggle led by the president of the ANC Women's League, Bathabile Dlamini, burst in. They were incensed, some in tears, that Ramaphosa, and not Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, had won the election.
Dlamini looked like she was raring for a fight. She swayed about, struggling to focus on the faces of the group of shrieking women around her. Among them was Lindiwe Zulu, ironically now the minister who has to mop up the mess Dlamini created in the social development portfolio.
Realising they could not speak lucidly, the group flounced into an office in the media centre and shut the door. Squawks and raised voices were occasionally audible.
It was all rather bizarre. But there was a bigger show in town so nobody paid much attention.
At a women's league media briefing the next day, Dlamini said the election results were “an attack on the gains of women’s struggles”.
“We feel the ANC has failed the women of SA. We have to express our disappointment as members of the ANC,” she said. “OR Tambo must be turning in his grave.”
We feel the ANC has failed the women of SA. We have to express our disappointment as members of the ANC
— Bathabile Dlamini
After being kicked off her ministerial perch, Dlamini is still exploiting the struggle for gender equality and the plague of violence against women to wage her political battles.
In an interview with Eyewitness News this week, she opted for the rape trope to protest about the severe criticism she faced as social development minister.
“I feel like I was, you know when you’re undressed and raped? That is the feeling I had.”
She also blamed “patriarchy” for the SA Social Security Agency debacle that endangered the livelihoods of 17-million grant recipients.
If ours were an accountable society, Dlamini would be banned from further association with gender struggles.
Rape is the most violent of crimes and is a highly evocative issue. Sexism is a means to subjugate women and is responsible for many disparities in society. Dlamini's attempt to excuse her atrocious record in the cabinet and her failure to manage the social grant system by citing violent sexual assault is utterly contemptible.
In trying in this way to portray herself as a victim — of among other things, a damning judgment by the Constitutional Court that she was “reckless” and “grossly negligent” as minister — she trivialises rape and patriarchal attitudes.
In a garbled letter resigning as an MP, Dlamini claimed that she had been made a “scapegoat” in the saga. She claimed other ANC members were responsible for Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) having a stranglehold on the grant payment system.
“Those that made profit through CPS by their wives are known, but because they are well respected in the organisation, nothing has been said to them,” Dlamini said in her letter.
The DA called her bluff and laid a complaint with the police, saying Dlamini was compelled to report her knowledge of crime or would be complicit in these offences.
But this is also an opportunity to confront the tendency for women to camouflage their political and factional agendas by blaming sexism, or to raise it as a defence when they are found to be useless at their jobs.
Dlamini could have used her position as minister and women’s league president to genuinely advance gender struggles. She failed hopelessly to do so.
From December 2017 until now, she and her crew have been wailing that Dlamini-Zuma lost the presidential race because the ANC was not ready to be led by a woman. This is rubbish.
Dlamini-Zuma lost because her faction was flying the flag for state capture and the extension of Jacob Zuma’s control. They also lost because David Mabuza feared the ANC would lose power with Dlamini-Zuma at the helm and threw in his lot with Ramaphosa. Many people, including Dlamini-Zuma’s former cheerleaders like Fikile Mbalula, have since come to the same realisation.
Dlamini is not alone in trying to blame her failures on sexism. Former minister Nomvula Mokonyane, former SAA chair Dudu Myeni and former deputy national director of public prosecutions Nomgcobo Jiba all want to claim they faced an onslaught because they were women in positions of power. Defenders of public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane are using the same argument.
Empowering women does not entail sanctioning corruption or incompetence. And irrespective of gender, people who use their positions to loot and serve factional agendas deserve to be punished and ostracised.
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