Let go of 'big man politics', focus on gender governance!

It has become customary for women in South Africa to live in fear and be subjected to a host of violent encounters.

Over the last few years there have been numerous #JusticeFor hashtags which are mostly similar in their nature: a woman has either been killed, sexually abused, or has been found dead after a search campaign has been trending on social media. 

These have become part of the experience of living in this country. Apart from the structural formation of the nation state, which invariably prioritises and upholds the ideal patriarchal authority in both public and private domains, the everyday life is very much constructed around fear and its disciplining tactics where women and gender-nonconforming people are concerned.

In Pumla Gqola’s recent book, Female Fear Factory, she shows us how the function of fear is to discipline. Understanding fear within the context of aggressive masculinities and the culture of impunity, the primary function of fear is to regulate women’s behaviours, women’s choices, and to create the conditions where, if women act outside those constraints, discipline (in the form of acute or grotesque violence) is applied.

Gqola also argues that these public displays of violence and discipline work to signal the possibility that violence is imminent for other women should they not toe the line. Ultimately, fear and discipline function to communicate modes of power, and that language of communication is expressed in bodily harm, sexual assault and a host of other forms of abuse. 

Now, this is not a unique set of circumstances to SA. Gendered violence and its accomplices such as fear and discipline are a global phenomenon insofar as patriarchy and masculinities associated with violence are structural social formations recognised across societies and cultures. However, this, coupled with poor approaches to gender governance, only work to deepen the crisis.

Where critical public institutions – such as the police service, criminal justice services and government centres responsible for providing care for women — are inadequately resourced, or lack the requisite skills and competencies, or do not exercise a duty of care for victims, it only broadens the terrain for the culture of impunity. 

Apart from transforming value systems and public discourses on violence, abuse, and dominant ideals of patriarchal authority in South Africa, gender sensitive governments, alongside their institutions, are critical in reforming state approaches to “dealing with” gender-based violence. 

In Fezokuhle Mthonti’s 2016 article titled “A Rapist State’s Children: Jacob Zuma & Chumani Maxwele”, insightful remarks are made on the nature of patriarchal leadership in SA and how in many ways our political leaders have contributed to the culture of rape, as well as victim-shaming and blaming.

Beyond that, Mthonti also points us to the implicit and explicit ways in which key political figures, and what I would describe as patriarchal political leadership, participate in “big man politics” which often makes use of accusations of sexual assault and abuse to score cheap political shots.

In early 2020, EFF leader Julius Malema and ANC MP Boy Mamabolo entered into an accusatory back-and-forth on domestic violence, in which President Cyril Ramaphosa was accused of allegedly abusing his late former wife. The president later apologised for the debate, stating that gender-based violence should not be politicised.

Although this recognition was made by the president, it also further signals how “big man politics” is a zero sum game which will make use of anything it has at its disposal to maintain itself.

A larger problem, however, is how “big man politics” not only focuses on power contestations and factional battles between and within parties, it also maligns critical gendered approaches to governance and makes gendered politics peripheral to “bigger issues” in public discourse. 

This has profound implications on public discourse and responses to GBV as it creates the impression that “gender issues” are mainly auxiliary to “macro issues” such as the economy, state institutions, and other issues which take up significant airtime in the public domain.

Big man politics, coupled with delinking the state and its institutions from being implicit in the culture of violence and its modes of communication, will not take us forward in adequately dealing with this crisis.

Gender governance is one of the most critical approaches to good governance in South Africa. This approach understands that from a structural perspective, women are subject to patriarchal formations of society which render them increasingly vulnerable, including to endemic forms of violence.

Moreover, gender governance understands that beyond the discourse of development, a government ought to create the kinds of social, spatial and cultural conditions where violence and abuse are mitigated — and in the event where violence and abuse have occurred, women have adequate access to justice and recourse. 

This can only happen where GBV is not seen as an event, but it is part of the many structural issues in South Africa which policy reform, alongside a capable gender governance machinery, is required to address.

Gouws and Dlakavu, in a 2021 article, paint an accurate but grim picture of the status of post-democratic institutions responsible for oversight where gender governance is concerned. They show us how the erosion, and in many instances the collapse, of the “national gender machinery” has resulted in what “feminists who were part of the National Women’s Coalition did not want – the ghettoisation of gender issues in one department”: the department of women, youth and people with disabilities.  

The inefficiencies of this department has compromised the quality of gender governance where violations against women are concerned.

If anything, civil society has increasingly become the avenue in which approaches to gender governance are developed and thought through in great detail. However, civil society, with its limited resources and minimal influence on the day-to-day operations of gender governance institutions, can only do so much where public participation and policy influence is concerned. 

The state, alongside its institutions, has a  duty of care over its citizens. A critical component of exercising that care is the state sharpening its ideas and implementation strategies on gender governance, should it wish to effectively deal with the culture of rape and abuse in SA.  

Lihle Ngcobozi is a lecturer at the Wits School of Governance. 

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