Women can be good showpieces for dictators
Eighth March was Women’s Day. Uganda’s top women – the politicians, the professionals and successful business types – were highly visible in posh places, ‘eating cash’, with or without male companions. Some spent part of the day attending government functions, also eating taxpayers’ cash.
For many of those women, the day was an occasion for fun, laughter, endless social media gossip and delicious platefuls. It was a great time to be a woman.
But these are a minority, however conspicuous they may be.
For the majority of our women, 8-3-17 came in the middle of diminishing real incomes, of street battles with city authorities and of demolished market stalls, of joblessness or insecure employment, of acute food shortages, unavailable or unaffordable medical care; a day in the middle of generalised despondence.
Yes, they had knocked down the confines of the domestic kitchen and demystified the office and business work place, but they were not the glorious species that NRM hype made you think the ruling party had invented. And they certainly did not look like they were going to be enjoying middle income status in 2020.
To many of these in formal employment, the day was a public holiday on which they took a break from boring work and saved on transport costs without the penalty of a pay cut.
If they were in informal employment, it was another day of struggle, with their income on the day depending on the nature of their enterprise. With luck, a modest outing was on someone else’s bill.
To the very wretched in the bottom shelf, it was another day of near-starvation, malnourished children, unmitigated pain and humiliation. Women’s Day did not exist; unless mankind agreed that it was the day a happier world mocked the woman grovelling in the dust.
But to return to the achievers, to the positive cases; those who seized the opportunities men could not deny them on the strength of their CVs; those who rode on the wheels of affirmative action and earned from the dubious goal of ‘making a difference’; to the feminist NGO priestesses who delivered the sermons in the cult of the woman; to the 21st Century African women going upward; how far upward can they really go; not only in Uganda, but in different places where pseudo-democratic authoritarianism and naked autocracy are the norm? And how valuable have they been to their less fortunate fellow women?
Like among most primates, the tendency of male social dominance seems to be ingrained in human biology. But man has also cultivated a range of cultural, moral and philosophical insights that led to the doctrine of equal rights for women.
The movement in this direction has been an international effort. And there were big dollars in it too. Not only were some donor grants linked to the gender question, but many powerful women were patrons and directors of gender-related NGOs where they earned and swindled money and became rich.
However, although the women who emerged are seen colourfully walking up and down near power, talking, sometimes screaming, they never really get in power. Africa’s hard men are apparently as effective at keeping out women as they are with male competition.
But there is something else. Perhaps because of that ingrained ‘the male is boss’, with its implied vague masochism, Africa’s women politicians seem to accept the position of the dominant male more readily than men. The men tend to become hostile more quickly.
To the dominant hard man, women – especially if they are mainly of only average ability – do not appear directly threatening. The very brilliant and very strong types are better kept at a distance, even abroad.
Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, for instance, parades more women in parliament (as a percentage) than almost any other country on earth. They are a soft façade masking the hardness of the regime. Oh…and they almost always vote “yes”!
In countries with a strong quest for change, many of these women near power thus become a large reservoir of reactionary energy in the service of despotism, corruption and socio-economic stagnation, the very enemies of their fellow women in the dust.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
