India is stirred and shaken by South Africa

JYOTI MALHOTRA

New Delhi, July 18, 2007 : Stirred by South Africa’s success in introducing women to top leadership positions, but refusing to be shaken by the abysmal Indian comparison, Congress president Sonia Gandhi now wants first-hand lessons from none other than the African National Congress when she visits South Africa in August.

South African foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamnini Zuma, in the capital for the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) foreign ministerial meeting, was all set for a short courtesy call on Sonia Gandhi last evening.

But when she began telling her about the ANC’s overwhelming success in introducing Black women into top leadership positions in business, politics as well as in the civil services, the meeting went on for more than an hour.

Zuma is said to have told her : ``India is a big country, you cannot change it much in five years. But what about the legacy you’re going to leave behind? You must introduce power in top leadership positions, so that they can exercise power.’’

``Sonia Gandhi was over the moon about what we told her,’’ said Jerry Matsila, Foreign Secretary of South Africa, a former high commissioner to India and a key figure in the ANC.

Turns out that Sonia is going on a part nostalgia-part diplomatic trip to South Africa next month, when she will give a lecture in Cape Town, emphasise fraternal relations with ANC leaders, travel to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for 26 years during the apartheid years, and visit some Mahatma Gandhi sites around Durban.

Now Zuma’s vivid description to Sonia about the ANC’s success in empowering Black women in the new South Africa seems to have the Congress president all charged up.

So at the ANC headquarters in Johannesburg, Sonia will be given a full presentation of the South African story, complete with audits and checking mechanisms, Matsila said.

Seems the Congress President briefly tried to defend the home team, by telling Zuma about India’s intervention at the panchayat level, how 33 per cent women necessarily had to be elected as sarpanches.

But the South African minister simply smiled the Indian leader’s success away.

Then she began to reel out the statistics : Of South Africa’s 110 ambassadors worldwide, 39 were women, the largest number in the world. As much as 60 per cent of the $70 billion annual budget was in the hands of women ministers who could decide how to spend it. Moreover, a South African company could only bid for a state tender if at least 25 per cent of that company was held by women.

``In the last 13 years since South Africa became free in 1994, we have created a Black middle class that now accounts for 17 per cent of the population,’’ Matsila said, pointing out that a large percentage of them were now women.

So who was responsible for this gender bias? ``It’s the ANC spirit of course,’’ said Matsila, ``we fought for our country’s freedom, and now we know we have to build an egalitarian society. Mandela showed us the way. President Mbeki personally looks at updates at what and how his Cabinet ministers are doing on this score. We know that empowering women is the only way to do it,’’ he added.

ENDS