Author: L. Muthoni Wanyeki
Date: January 22, 2007
Type of article: Commentary
Source: The East African http://www.nationmedia.com/eastafrican/22012007/Opinion/Opinion2201071.htm

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The World Social Forum is here. Hotels in Nairobi are full. All roads lead to Kasarani, where the WSF village has been set up and most events will take place. And Kenyans can be bemused by the number of clearly atypical and non-conformist non-tourists exploring non-tourist parts of town in search of insights into the “real” Kenya.

This is the first time that the WSF has been held entirely in Africa — last year, Mali’s capital Bamako hosted one of three legs. The presence of such a range of activists from all over the globe is sure to stimulate discussion on African citizens’ mobilisation to achieve the other world that is the promise of the WSF.

In direct response to the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, taking place in Davos, Switzerland at the same time, the WSF addresses the negative impact of neo-liberal globalisation on the majority of citizens around the world.

There will be discussions, meetings, rallies and workshops during the course of this week. They have been preceded by an almost equal number last week as everyone prepared to use this opportunity to interact cross-regionally.

One such cross-regional initiative was the Feminist Dialogues, convened by 12 feminist organisations from all regions that drew just under 200 feminists from Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America.

The theme of the FD was “feminist democracies: visions and strategies.”

The most basic understanding of democracy is, of course, government by and for the people. Which raised the first point of contention — who “the people” actually are. In much of Africa, women’s citizenship is still achieved only through their fathers or husbands.

AFRICA WOMEN FORM THE MAJORITY of refugee communities in Africa. African women experience other forms of systemic discrimination, especially African women belonging to forest dwelling and pastoralist communities whose livelihoods are under threat, to ethnic, racial and religious minorities, among those who live in utterly unserviced low-income urban neighbourhoods, who are lesbians. In short, the different forms of systemic discrimination compound each other where African women are concerned.

Then is the issue of what “for the people” means. To work “for the people” means ensuring that enough of their representatives take part in political decision-making to make it responsive to the real needs and concerns of their constituencies. While significant gains have been made in some parts of Africa — Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda — the political process remains out of reach of women in most of Africa.

African women parliamentarians often show more allegiance to the political parties that nominate them than to the African women they purportedly represent. A particularly chilling example of this was evident in the near silence among South African women parliamentarians over the widely-publicised rape trial of presidential hopeful Jacob Zuma.

The African women’s movement must move not only beyond the focus on quantity, they also must move beyond the proposed focus on quality — for the latter implies that the problem is merely one of awareness and ethics among the African women who have entered the political domain.

The problem is the processes and systems that actually define the political domain. A powerful example of this was provided by women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the recent elections — the first in over 40 years. Of the 33 presidential candidates, five were women. They did not stand a chance; worse, the commitment to a basic level of women’s representation was ignored with impunity.

We have a long way to go. May the WSF debates invigorate our struggle.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is a political scientist based in Nairobi, Kenya