When ANC Women’s League president Bathabile Dlamini confirmed the rumour that Sunday Times journalist Qaanitah Hunter heard about the six men spotted in the women’s league delegation for the ANC’s national policy conference currently under way at the Nasrec Expo Centre south of Johannesburg, Hunter couldn’t believe her luck. “I didn’t have a story until that point, only a rumour, and this gave me my story,” she said. Dlamini could, for instance, just have denied it and nobody might have been any the wiser.

If the original rumour was hard to believe, the actual cold hard truth was even harder. It would have been much better if it were fake news, in fact.

Dlamini told Hunter in the presence of a number of witnesses: “Sometimes we lose debates because we become emotional, so now we want experts to argue.”

If anybody had bargained on Dlamini to dismantle patriarchy, their bets were on the wrong woman. She sounded like one of those male doctors who, in older times, diagnosed women with sexual desires or a tendency to cause trouble with female hysteria, or perhaps like some latter-day religious types who say women aren’t worthy of leading in prayer (come to think of it, none of those leading the ANC’s broad church in prayer at the opening of the policy conference on Friday were women).

It is like she is channelling patriarchy.

While nobody has really been under the false impression that Dlamini actually cared about women – if she did, social and child grants wouldn’t have been a mess – at least she could try to appear to know what affirming women and dismantling male dominance entails.

This is the same bunch of women who tell us that South Africa needs a woman president – initially they said any woman president would do, but later they specifically said it should be former African Union chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. It’s possible that the woman president campaign was designed for her long before she was named anyway.

Already there are perceptions and suspicions that Dlamini-Zuma really is a front for men, and more specifically her former husband and the father of her four daughters, President Jacob Zuma. Nevermind her long string of accomplishments and considerable intelligence, the only reason why some now say Zuma is supporting her, is because she is his “get out of jail free” card.

Dlamini-Zuma, although she’s tried to distance her personal affairs from Zuma, has never said anything to make anyone believe that she would not protect him should he be prosecuted or jailed for, say corruption or fraud (there is the small matter of the 783 charges he might still have to answer for).

Dlamini’s lack of commitment to the gender cause also doesn’t help perceptions that Dlamini-Zuma is being pushed opportunistically.

How would a woman president be different to a male one if she’s really just a front for a bunch of puppeteers with penises? How can we trust her to be the voice of women if her biggest backers in the women’s league need men to tell the ANC what women want?

Has the woman’s league even ever been something more than just another campaign instrument for interests determined by men? It was, after all, the same league under a different leader (Angie Motshekga, when she was still favoured by the powerful camp) who said South Africa wasn’t ready for a woman president at a time when they really wanted to see Zuma re-elected in Mangaung.

The league’s record during former president Thabo Mbeki’s reign wasn’t much better – the league was pretty demure before they found enough of a voice which they then used to back Zuma in his rape trial.

The party’s mobilisation chief Fikile Mbalula’s argument – at a press conference on Sunday – that even men can advance the gender cause doesn’t fly in this case, because there are plenty of men among the 2500 or so delegates who could advance this cause during this conference. After all, the ANC’s constitution says the party adheres to principles of non-sexism, so theoretically everyone in the party should be a gender advocate and discussions should be infused by this principle.

The way Dlamini’s people have been pushing Whatsapps with campaign messages for Dlamini-Zuma during a policy conference, while the party’s leaders are trying hard to spin it as a festival of ideas and not a leadership race, isn’t establishing the wannabe-president’s credentials as an exemplary leader either. True, the fight beneath all the proxy battles on direction and policy really is about who becomes party president in December, but at least perhaps delegates could try to pretend to care.

There is another problem with the six men in the women’s league delegation, and that is that it raises questions about how many rent-a-crowd delegates* there are at the conference overall. How many of the youth league delegates are really young, and to what an extent will the resolutions that will determine the direction and outcome of the leadership elections in December be that of actual ANC members in actual branches?

Most of the delegates are men to start off with. Dlamini as well as Small Business Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu in a passing conversation in the media lounge at Nasrec said this was a “societal problem” and not just an ANC problem.

Besides, Dlamini snapped, would you ask these questions at a Democratic Alliance conference? Actually, yeah, but the DA doesn’t pride itself in believing in gender quotas and they are being criticised for that.

Branches select delegates, and when it’s impossible to impose quotas for such, branches seem to prefer men. Ditto for party provincial chairpersons – when was the last time you heard of a woman being elected to this position? In any event, the quotas for local government lists and for the ANC’s national executive committee, while praiseworthy, cause of lot of infighting and even physical fights in a party where principles are no longer the first prize.

South Africa might be ready for a woman’s president, but is the ANC? DM

* According to Shireen Hassim, professor in political studies at Wits, who spoke about this to to Eusebius McKaiser on 702 on Monday.

Photo: Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma at the ANC Policy Conference. (Ihsaan Haffejjee)