31-03-06

NO TO WOMEN’S AFFAIR’S CABINET MINISTER

We at Women for Change (WfC) have learnt with disappoint and disgust the decision by President Levy Patrick Mwanawasa to unilaterally and shamelessly appoint a cabinet Minister to be in charge of Women’s affairs- a portfolio we rejected when a deputy minister for women’s affairs in the ministry of community development was appointed.  

What is even more diabolical is that the position has been created just to create a Job.  We also see it as a deliberate move to further trivialize women’s issues in this country because of the circumstances under which the ministry has been created.

The appointment is indeed a draw back for women in Zambia, taking us back to the Women in Development Approach that tended to focus on women almost exclusively and assumed that women were outside the mainstream of development.

 President Mwanawasa  should be reminded that States unanimously including Zambia  agreed at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held at Beijing in 1995, that it was essential to design, implement and monitor, effective, efficient and mutually reinforcing gender-sensitive policies and programmes, including development policies and programmes at all levels, to foster the empowerment and advancement of women.

A Women’s affairs ministry will be far from achieving these goals. It will just put women’s issues in a corner without influencing the policy programmes of other ministries call for changes in the overall social structure.  

Hence our option for a Gender Commission that we recommended in our submission to the Constitution Review Commission.  This will ensure mainstreaming of  gender as a strategy for making women's as well as men's concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated.

We therefore reject in the strongest term this appointment because it is taking us backwards.

We also wish  to remind President Mwanawasa that the Women’s movement in Zambia have repeatedly  made proposals to previous  constitution review commissions and the current review process represents a fresh opportunity for the new constitution  to be imbued with the equality values.

We have demanded for the transformation of Gender in Development Division (GIDD) to be transformed into a Gender Commission created by the Constitution and represented in Cabinet. In this way the Gender Commission will promote respect for gender equity and equality and the protection, development and attainment of gender equality that a Women’s Affairs Ministry will not do.

The Gender Commission will have the power to monitor, investigate, research, educate, lobby and report to government on issues concerning gender equality.

We therefore demand that the Portfolio for Cabinet Minister for Women’s Affairs be abolished. It is backward and unnecessary and also a waste of resources.

We condemn the creation of jobs for political cadres when as a country we are in dire need of resources for poverty eradication.  It is a Shame that President Mwanawasa has continued to appoint deputies, a portfolio that has been rejected by the people.

We at Women for Change call upon the people of Zambia especially women not to allow ourselves to be used by politicians for their political motives. We the women of Zambia should stand up and not allow being used men’s stepping-stones.