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IS IT A WOMAN’S WORLD?

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Sir,

I was discussing with my female friends the other day who asserted that this was a woman’s world and that men just live in it. I could not but agree with them. These are ladies who have never lacked anything in their lives. They come from what you call privileged backgrounds.


They do not know what it meant for a father to refuse to send a girl child to school because the family could not afford to pay school fees of all the children, and also because girl child would get married and take another man’s name anyway.


They grew up ferried to school and never saw the deprivation that girls suffer when they manage to make it to school. They grew up in the midst of loads of drivers, stewards, nannies and bodyguards. Marriage to people like this is nothing more than a contract or business relationship. If it works, so be it. If not, what the heck! There are no eternal sacrifices. The guy would not dare raise his hands against them and they never worry about infidelities or any kind of misbehaviour. ‘Let him try it’, they would say, assuring you that he would pay heavily for it in such a way that he possibly would never recover.


Blame


So how do you blame these people when they say the world belongs to them? They live in a world which is oblivious of the travails that poor  women suffer all over the world. They are insulated from the stories of millions of girl children who are out of school all over the world. They very likely never heard of the story of children who go to bed hungry. They barely hear of girls, out of diapers, who are forced into marriage.


They do not know about women who have suffered untold consequences from philandering husbands, women who have lost their lives from the physical, emotional and psychological abuses from men. They do not know about diseases that ravage women as a result of forced marriage or risks that hundreds of thousands of women are exposed to just because they get pregnant and are about to bring forth.

They do not seek employment from anyone, neither are they interested in politics and so they are unaware of the reality of the glass ceiling or the discrimination that limits the other women. They are just in a world of their own and cannot empathise with women who are not  in luck as they are.


Harder


But in the real world where you and I live, life is much harder for the female gender. We have a crop of elite women who completely ignore the fundamental issues affecting women and girls. The best part of this, from the perspective of the class warfare, is that we women applaud and encourage their oppressors, lavishing them with attention and accolades. Each of us, lost in our individual struggles, fail to truly connect the dots between the collapse of public administration in Eswatini and the hardship we all encounter at various levels.

This journey to self-destruction only intensifies with time. The stakes get higher and higher. Poverty and suffering are exploding all around us and we choose to pretend there is nothing we can do.
We normalise injustice, blaming so called culture and traditions, weak institutions etc, as if people like you and I weren’t responsible for upholding those practices or for corrupting those structures.


If we do some soul searching, we are sure to find that from top to bottom, each one of us is guilty of encouraging some corrupt practices or the other, some form of injustice. We have turned religion and tradition to weapons, refusing rational thought and creativity. As for our elite women, some of the vibrant and well educated, it is stunning to find a number of them are still so passive on political issues.

Those who are allowed into the boy’s club seek political power with no pro-people ideology to justifying their quest and the rest of us are turned into willing sycophants when we applaud and endorse such individuals.


It is too easy to blame every government for our conundrum without stopping to think of the role we play in upholding injustice, mediocrity and incompetence. The 2018 elections were no different on such issues. In fact many of the said issues are obscured by our unwillingness to identify corruption as the fundamental issue in Eswatini. Yet we continue to default.

Colleen Matsebula

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