Plenty of pricey talk, no action
The department of women has a sorry record on addressing gender violence
● The department of women spent R1.1m last year on consultants investigating the distribution of free “sanitary dignity products” — but after two years the project has still not been finalised.
What it did do, said the department’s 2017/2018 annual report, was send staff to gender summits in SA and abroad, and have meetings, consultations and dialogues.
But a report on what the dialogues achieved was never tabled in parliament as planned, even though they cost taxpayers R1.4m in consultancy fees.
In total, R6.3m was spent on consultants, according to the report.
This week, as South Africans expressed outrage at the high rate of murder and rape of women, attention turned to the department, which bills itself as “the custodian of the promotion and advancement of gender equality and the empowerment of women”.
In a statement last week, minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said: “Relationships should not result in death.
“They should be loving and supportive. A victim of violence must have confidence that when she files a police report, she will receive justice and the perpetrator will be punished.
“We cannot continue to live lives that are constantly under siege and where we are not all enjoying the fruits of our constitutional democracy. Enough is enough, we need justice.”
When it comes to addressing genderbased violence, however, the department indicated it had not met its targets, though it had “held dialogues with women”.
One of its annual performance indicators is “interventions to enhance prevention and elimination of violence against women and children”.
Listed in the most recent report was a “moral regeneration movement” meeting in Kimberley in 2017, a Women’s Day celebration on August 9 last year in the same city, an interdenominational meeting on genderbased violence in Upington, a “cancer awareness-raising imbizo”, the launch of the 16 days of activism campaign and a men’s meeting in Port Elizabeth.
But when the parliamentary oversight committee listened to the department’s annual performance plan in July, its members were unimpressed. In a statement afterwards, the committee said it could not “understand the issues the department is working on as there is no visible community outreach”, and it did not see tangible achievements.
Of the department’s R204m budget in 2017/2018, about R80m was allocated to the Commission for Gender Equality.
Of the rest, the lion’s share — R72.5m — went to salaries for the 101 staff members. In addition to this, R13m was spent on travel and subsistence, R11.5m on “property managers” and R6.3m on consultants.
The report listed staff members’ four official trips abroad in the financial year as “achievements”. Of the R13m spent on travel, R4m was for overseas travel. This was down from the R17m for overseas and domestic travel spent in the previous financial year.
The trips included flying to New York to attend the UN Commission on the Status of Women conference in 2017.
There was also a three-day meeting of the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) in Swaziland and a five-day AU meeting in Ethiopia.
Then, at the beginning of 2018, a Sadc meeting was held in Ethiopia to prepare for the next UN Commission on the Status of Women conference in New York in 2018.
The report does not specify how many people went on these trips.
In parliament, IFP MP Liezl van der Merwe called the department an “employment agency” and asked why it needed to spend millions on consultants when its staff had such high salaries.
Of the 101 staff, 47 were in senior positions, with annual salaries averaging R1m each.
Detailed questions sent to the department were not answered. Instead, spokesperson Shalen Gajadhar sent copies of seven speeches made by department members.
In one of the speeches, former minister Bathabile Dlamini explained that the department’s sanitary dignity project was about providing free sanitary pads to impoverished women and ending “menstrual poverty”.
She added: “The programme is looking towards the future, planning for provision of sanitary dignity to all indigent women and girls in the country.”
Parliamentary researcher Kashiefa Abrahams, when presenting an analysis of the department of women’s most recent annual report, described the explanations about the national dialogues set up to discuss gender violence as “incoherent”.
R6.3m spent on consultants
R103,000 MONEY SPENT on consultants for a draft concept on how to organise Women’s Day
R1.1m MONEY SPENT on consultants investigating distribution of free sanitary products