MyPE

Community Business Directory, Event Listings, News and Views from Gqeberha, Nelson Mandela Bay

Equality and Access to the Public Protector

By

Dear Editor

On Women’s Day, 9 August 2012, the Eastern Cape Democratic Alliance Women’s Network (DAWN) celebrated women’s rights-based resistance to the extension of racist and gendered legislation in 1956 with the Public Protector, Advocate Thuli Madonsela.

Our constitutional democracy with mechanisms for equality, redress and reconciliation provides for an enabling environment for women. All South African women have the vote and equal citizenship yet many are oppressed by material conditions which have deteriorated and created concentric circles of haves and have nots or insiders and outsiders in our province. Insiders have jobs, homes, incomes, skills and assets and outsiders have neither employment, homes of their own, income nor skills. Outsiders’ lives are defined by what they do not have and their daily life is nothing but a struggle to survive. Insiders’ lives are defined by what they have and what they want to have in the future.

South Africa has one of the highest income inequality gaps in the world and, despite the paper rights of our constitution, black women remain the poorest group of outsiders in this country. The Public Protector, Advocate Thuli Madonsela, informed delegates that: the majority of HIV sufferers in SA are women between the ages of 15 and 21; that the unemployed majority are women between the ages of 15 and 34; that her office has 166 000 reports of sexual offences against women to deal with and that country-wide consultation indicates that child-headed households, transactional sex, housing and defective RDP houses are national issues in which the majority of affected parties have a women’s face.

World Economic Forum (WEF) research shows that South Africa has the highest rate of rape in the world, that this is a most violent society and that our literacy and numeracy rates are ranked second last globally. These phenomena, coupled with our excessive income inequality gap and research results quoted by the Public Protector, shape a hostile environment in which many women are marginalised, commodified as sex objects and
trapped in a feminised cycle of unemployment, gender violence and poverty.

During question time Advocate Madonsela engaged with many women whose lives are constrained by unemployment, violence and poverty. She accepted documents to process cases of gender violence and maladministration and also gave contact details for her national office to the delegates.

On Women’s Day this year one woman, committed to the constitutional imperative to serve all South Africans without fear or favour, singularly enabled social justice and empowered an audience of 700 other women in the Eastern Cape who left with hope and knowledge.

This is a fine way to redress past and present injustice against women and to celebrate Women’s solidarity and strength.

We are most grateful to the Public Protector and her staff for the time and effort put into making the East Cape DAWN event a life-changing success for our delegates and look forward to learning more from her as her office fulfils its mandate to strengthen constitutional democracy and redress improper and prejudicial conduct.

As citizens who enjoy equal constitutional rights the ANC is welcome to follow our example.

Kind regards

CELESTE BARKER

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Port Elizabethan

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