Women Receding In Government

Jun 10, 2003

The May reshuffle left many mouths open. It saw the fall of a women’s rights activist, Miria Matembe and Vice President Specioza Kazibwe.

The May reshuffle left many mouths open. It saw the fall of a women’s rights activist, Miria Matembe and Vice President Specioza Kazibwe.
The women’s movement will definitely miss the contributions of these two gallant women at ministerial level.
There are questions around how representative and inclusive the cabinet is. While others have shown concern over the under or over-representation of some regions, religious bodies and other interest groups, there is a gross under representation of over 50% of Uganda’s population: the women! The steep decline in the proportion of women in the national executive (President, the Vice President and ministers) from 29% in 1999 to 20.5% to date can not go unnoticed. While the 1999 appointments almost touched the 30% line — required in an institution to make a difference — the 2003 reshuffle miserably fails the test. This shows a conspicuous disregard of what has hitherto been a progressive contribution by women to the field of politics and decision-making. Only three out of 23 full ministers are women (13%)! And of the 45 Ministers of State, only 24.4% are women. The majority of women in cabinet occupy relatively lower-status ministerial positions as ministers of state.
Women are making very little progress and stand to lose the gains made over the years.
Despite the establishment of the Ministry of Women in Development in 1988 and the promulgation of the 1995 gender sensitive Constitution, the developments in favour of women have been slow. The ministry itself has undergone transformation from one that focused exclusively on women’s issues to one that deals with all kinds of things, such as gender, labour and social development. But that mandate has not been followed by a commensurate increase in resources to facilitate its work. The ministry is amongst those that receive a very lean budget. Policy commitments related to gender (such as the National Gender Policy and National Action Plan for Women) have largely remained on paper. According to A Glance at the Budget (February 2002), the budgetary allocations to the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development as a share of the total GOU budget were 0.2% in 1998/1999, 0.4% in 1999/2000 and 0.5% in 2000 /2001. These allocations signal that gender issues are not given the importance they should be; and point to the extent to which policy commitments will be honoured.
A number of laws crucial to the advancement of women have not been enacted. The bill of rights of women in the Constitution remains largely un operationalised. The Domestic Relations Bill, the family land rights proposal/co-ownership of land by spouses and the law against gender based violence are some of the proposed laws that have received minimal attention from the Executive.
The biggest roadblocks to having these laws in place have been erected by the highest offices in the land!
Demands by women to have these laws enacted have been greeted with cynical remarks like: “Women have had enough!”
Lately, affirmative action for women in politics has come under threat. There are calls from many circles to scrap it, even before its effectiveness has been assessed. Article 78 (2) of the Constitution gives Affirmative Action a grace period of 10 years from 1995, after which the policy should be reviewed for purposes of retaining, increasing or abolishing it. Besides this, the Equal Opportunities Commission supposed to give full effect to affirmative action has never been established.
The Government should at this time be engaged in preparing ground for an exercise that will evaluate the policy before it does away with it. Only then can we proudly say that Uganda is nurturing a good culture of constitutionalism.
The list of disappointments is endless. As women, our numerical strength, which I believe is our voting strength, needs to be noted. Appointments to positions of decision-making must strive to reflect this!
The argument always fronted that there are not enough able women to fill these positions is erroneous.
There are enough to fill the entire cabinet of 68!

Vat Kamatsiko, Focal Person, Coalition for Political Accountability to Women

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