Source: The Zimbabwean
During 2015, we shall take our continental programme of gender equality and women's empowerment to a higher level: by ensuring that women are at the table in conflict resolution and peace building by increasing the representation of women in public life; through the economic empowerment and financial inclusion of women; and by modernizing agriculture, and addressing women's access to land, technology, markets, infrastructure, and capital...

During the Year of Women, we must pay special attention to the girl child, making sure that they are all in and remain in school, that we end child marriages and female genital mutilation, teenage parenthood and harness the potential of both boys and girls. [Statement by the Chairperson of the African Union, Commission, HE Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, to the 24th Ordinary Session of the African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government].

"When it comes down to the ground, it's not easy for them. They get married, they must have babies, they must live at home, that's a problem... I'm saying it's not possible that women can be at par with men. You see, we men; we want children. We make the very women we want in power, pregnant. You see, and we remain. It's not possible - that aspect only," [Robert Mugabe, incoming Chair of the AU].
Contrast these two statements, made within days of each other last week by the two senior executives of the AU. One is a woman, and the other a man. The woman is a mature, accomplished divorcee, whilst the man is a nonagenarian with views from many seasons past. If the aim of the AU in 2015 is to make this year a serious attempt at the empowerment of women, how much faith will we have that the Chair of the AU has any interest in this? For sure he will be interested in "indigenisation" of Africa's resources, but equally seems to have no clue that the major resource for any country and any continent is people, and people means women too.

When asked what she thought about Mugabe's remarks, Zuma is quoted as saying,

"my knowledge of the president is that he is very supportive of the empowerment of women". Perhaps she does not know the President of Zimbabwe as well as she thinks.

It seems that continent-wide, African men probably agree with Mugabe: women are the hewers of wood, the carriers of wood, the cultivators of the soil, and the carers of the family. Because this is what men want. And these two statements, juxtaposed against each other, demonstrate so clearly the lip service given to the equality of the genders and the dominance of patriarchy in Africa.

However, look at the lofty aspirations contained in Zuma's statement of the aims of the AU - a process that Mugabe will be tasked with supporting - women in conflict resolution, representation in public life, economic empowerment, and participating in modernised agriculture, no longer the tiresome and labour-intensive way of life so common for African women.

And, importantly, stopping child marriage, that abuse of girls that men seem to desire, because, as the incoming Chair of the AU says himself, "we want children". As if women themselves do not want children but only have them because their men want them, and, therefore, if a woman does not produce children, she is considered as not normal.

So, which is the President's real position? Will he drive the AU agenda or support patriarchy?

Well, there are some clues from his past pronouncements.

When the women of Zimbabwe expressed their concern at the lack of representation in the executive of his new government in 2013, Mugabe was reported as saying:

"Give us the women. This time we did proportional representation; there were just not enough women. Women are few in universities."

He suggests that he had no choice, but the evidence contradicts him: there are enormous numbers of competent and educated women able to hold down jobs in every sphere of public and private life in Zimbabwe. He seemed to contradict himself in the same address, and understood that Zimbabwe had made great strides in the emancipation of women. Both his wife and his previous Vice-President have doctorates, one of which is questionable. So Mugabe acknowledges that, in Zimbabwe, there should be no barriers to women's representation:

Education is for all now. It is mixed. The yield is the same. It is no longer necessary for us to have affirmative action, it is now free for all. Let women contest alongside men without any preferential treatment," said Mugabe.

Mugabe sees gender in development as a "women's" issue and an issue of numbers rather than as a critical requirement for effective development processes that address power relations between men and women, in all aspects of economic, political, social and cultural development.

So, it would seem that the problem, for him, is that women do not contest and that there are no barriers. This seems clearly at odds with the intention behind the AU's programme for 2015, which suggests, implicitly, that there was considerable work to be done if women were to "contest" with men. That is why Zuma, based on input from African women across the continent, suggests that we need an extensive programme that will allow women voice and participation in the socio-political life of their countries.

However, the lofty aspirations of the AU programme will come to naught if the fundamental bias that is patriarchy is not eliminated too. Take, for example, Mugabe's attitude to the suggestions that Joice Mujuru might aspire to be President of Zimbabwe:

"You start from the bottom, you were a nobody, you acquire a position in the central committee and then you are promoted to be in the inner core of the central committee, which we call the politburo, you are on the driving seat and it's pleasurable and you want to occupy that seat even if you don't qualify," he said...Wanting the position at the very top . . ."

How dare she, a mere woman, whom he has also called "simplistic", think that she could be President? Is this really what Mugabe will bring to the AU's 2015 agenda for empowering women? Or is merely stating what everyone knows, that a woman's place is in the home?

The attitude of the patriarchs in Zimbabwe, and probably Africa as a whole, have been no more succinctly expressed than by one Zimbabwean male, Francis Zimuto, the self-styled "Black Jesus":

"It will be against our culture for a woman to be president. We are conservative Zimbabweans. We are not like Western countries where the queen or a female president may rule," ...It will be taboo and we will not accept it. A woman's place is under the man and we are satisfied with her (Mujuru) current position as vice-president. In fact, that post should be reserved for women while the presidency should be for men," Zimuto said, in remarks likely to cause some ructions within the party.

And these are not idiosyncratic views, but held by the majority of men and probably a very large percentage of women. In the Mass Public Opinion Institute gender survey in 2002, only 29% of women stated that "women are more receptive to women leaders". And in answer to the question, "in your opinion, do women pull each other down?", 75% of women answered in the affirmative. Added to this picture, the Afrobarometer survey in 2012 demonstrated quite dramatically that nothing had changed since the MPOI survey in 2002. 89% of rural women and 91% of urban women answered in the affirmative to the question, do men make better leaders than women?

That is why the AU programme of gender equality and women's empowerment is so important, and deserves more than lip service and trite comment from the continent's leaders. And why Zuma will have to take her Chair in hand and explain to him that men's desire for children might be at odds with what women want. Furthermore, she might point out that any programme for gender equality and women's empowerment requires that men, even Presidents, better change their patriarchal attitudes.

Women can be presidents, and it has been happening all over the world, just not much in Africa, and it takes little education to know why. The problem is simple: men want children, but they do not think that this is their responsibility, and, until this changes, Mugabe's view will prevail, and so will patriarchy.

Robert Mugabe's notion that women want emancipation is not a Western concept. It is simply a developmental process that demands a just and fair society where women and men complement each other in society. Looking to changing the condition of women without changing their position in society is just old-fashioned.

 

• Zimbabwe