Women's Day is failing SA women

Women's Day is a complete waste of time. Cancel it.

It's filled with empty promises. Lies, actually. Women's Day is jam-packed with lies. This year was no different.

Podium-thumping politicians lectured to gatherings across South Africa about the need to honour and celebrate women.

They preached that women were the backbone of this country, that new governmental programmes were going to be implemented placing women's issues back on the national agenda and that when you strike a woman, you strike a rock ... blah blah blah.

I feel my blood boil when I listen to these worthless plans and words. How can the government claim to "celebrate" women when gender violence is a part of our everyday lives? When three women in South Africa are murdered every day by an intimate partner and we have the gruesome honour of being the rape capital of the world?

Women's Day is obviously not working for women. So, where is it going wrong?

Our criminal justice system as a whole has to take some blame. Our over-burdened and often corrupt police force is prone to poor quality investigations. This, in turn, leads to low murder conviction rates.

When a woman is murdered in South Africa, the perpetrator, more often than not, gets away with it and is free to do it again.

I wonder how those 20000 women who marched to the Union Buildings would have reacted if, back in 1956, somebody had told them that 58 years later, nobody in South Africa would have to carry a pass but all women would be well-advised to carry pepper spray to protect themselves from rape and murdering partners?

I can picture Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Sophie Williams and Rahima Moosa looking at each other in complete disbelief.

Blaming the government is easy and convenient. But it's not only the government that has let us down. South African men have also deserted us.

It's not okay to give your partner a few klaps now and again to "put her in her place". It's not okay to lounge on the sofa while your partner slaves away in the kitchen after slogging away at work the whole day. It's not okay to abandon your family, leaving them financially destitute. It's not okay to abscond from paying maintenance for your children.

We're not all like that, I hear you say. True. But when your brothers behave so badly, you don't step up and set them straight. You let it slide because you don't want to get involved in other people's business.

That said, South African women have also let themselves down. It's not okay for mothers to bring up their sons as invalids who can't make their own beds or feed themselves.

It's not okay for those same hypocritical mothers to insist that their daughters are domesticated and "trained" for married life.

Taking responsibility as a nation is where things fall apart. Nobody wants to accept that conflict resolution for us means the use of violence.

We need to own this grim situation and stop pretending on August 9 every year that everything is okay.

It's not okay when babies are raped, young girls have their education taken away and are forced into marriages and women are terrorised by their partners.

Stop taking us for the absolute fools you are.

We are not, okay?

• Devi's e-mail address: devi.sankaree@intekom.co.za
• @Devi_SG