Among the general objectives of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) are: (a) to promote gender equity and social transformation (b) to promote sustainable and inclusive socio-economic development.
Suffice to mention that it is imperative that these (general) objectives are achieved in order to realise the seven core ones that include, among others, progressive liberalization of trade in goods and services and elimination of tariffs and non-tariff barriers.
That said, Africa, like pretty much the rest of the world, is grappling with a layered problem of social death. According to American sociologist Orlando Patterson, social death is the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society.
Social death occurs through racial and/or gender exclusion, persecution, slavery, and apartheid. Everyone knows that most African states are yet to envisage strong desire to operate as ‘indivisible countries’ that appreciate and value the diverse culture and interests of their people.
The people in positions of power in Africa have gradually executed a slow social death on the masses, sometimes with wanton abandon. The political leadership in countries such as Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa – some of the Africa’s top economies – have decided to facilitate social death in their countries by denying its women opportunities in the highest positions of power, prosecuting dissents, encouraging repressive consciousness (that enable sexual and gender based violence to thrive) and marginalizing its youth, socially, economically and politically. On the verge of social death, Africa, as we know it currently, doesn’t hold the aspirations of its youth.
On September 21, 2020, Kenyan former Chief Justice David Maraga advised President Uhuru Kenyatta to dissolve parliament for failing to achieve two-thirds gender rule as prescribed by the Constitution of Kenya 2010. “Dissolving parliament is the radical remedy Kenyans desired to incentivize the political elites to adhere to and fully operationalise the transformation agenda of the constitution,” Maraga argued. Article 27(8) of the Kenyan Constitution provides that the State shall take legislative and other measures to implement the principle that not more than two-thirds of the members of elective or appointive bodies shall be of the same gender.
The Kenyan 12th parliament had416 members, 97 of whom were women that is; 23.3 per cent of the total membership. It means almost 80 per cent of the total membership were of the same gender (male); a flagrant contravention of the constitution. In 11th parliament, there were eight women in the National Assembly, just 19 per cent of the total membership. Again, almost 80 per cent of the total membership was of the same gender. No woman was elected to the Senate in 2013; just 18 women were nominated.
Regionally, Kenya, despite being the oldest democracy in Eastern Africa (14 years), followed by Burundi (11years), has the lowest presentation women in parliament. In Uganda, women accounted for 36 per cent of the country’s political leadership as of 2021. In Tanzania, the scenario became even more impressive with the ascension of Suluhu Hassan presidency on March 19, 2021 following the sudden death of John Magufuli on March 17, 2021.
At least 36 per cent of parliamentarians in Tanzania were women, as of January 2021. Rwanda has the highest women representation in parliament in Africa (64%) followed by South Africa (46%) and Namibia (44%) respectively. Continentally, East Africa has the second highest representation of women in parliament (32%) after Horn of Africa (33 %) and highest representation in local government (35%). The Kenyan 11th parliament failed on three attempts to enact relevant laws to address the question of two-thirds gender rule in Kenya. This has left the political landscape greatly imbalanced. For instance, of the 1, 450 elected members of county assemblies in Kenya in 2017, only 96 are women; mere 6.62 per cent.
As of October 2019, the global participation rate of women in national level parliament is 24.5 per cent. In 2018, women accounted for just 8 per cent of all national leaders and 2 per cent of all residential posts. Since 1960, to 2015, 108 women have become national leaders in 70 countries, with more being prime ministers than presidents.
As of April 1, 2019, the global average of women in national assemblies was 24.3 per cent. By July, 2019, only 23 per cent of sovereign nations had more than 30 per cent women in parliament. The current annual growth rate women in national parliament is about 0.5 per cent worldwide. At this rate, gender parity in national legislature will not be achieved until 2068.
Women constitute 24 per cent of the 12, 113 parliamentarians in Africa, 25 per cent in the lower house and 20 per cent in the upper houses of parliament, according to Women’s Political Participation: African Barometer.
“African women constitute a mere 12 per cent of the to six party functioning in ruling and position parties and 7 per cent of women in to political execution position (president, prime minister and deputy prime minister) across the continent,” the organisation observed early this year.
Six out of the ten countries in the Africa with the highest number of women in parliament employ the use of Proportional Representation (PR) electoral system in order to achieve gender balance. Only Ethiopia and Uganda – the former follows voluntary party quota whereas the latter uses reserved seats quota – in the top ten, follow First Past the Post (FPTP) system. Kenya uses the FPTP system with a constitutional quota, which is less effective, compared to voluntary quota. In the words of Margaret Nasha, former speaker of the parliament of Botswana, democracy means government of the people by the people, and not government of the people by Men.
While sexism, electoral systems, cultural prejudice and financial constraints are some of the major challenges faced by Kenyan women seeking leadership positions in Kenya, it is the general foundation upon which African polity is built that works against the realisation of gender equity. In her article titled: It Is Time to Axe Kenya’s Big Dick Politics, Kenyan writer and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola argues that; “it is not enough to just observe that Kenya’s politics is elitist. We must also contend with the fact that it is overwhelmingly patriarchal. All Kenya’s largest ethnic groups, for example, are cried by toxic violent masculinities that poison the national dialogue and crowd out constructive discourse on anything else.
Two, the African society is sexually repressive. In his maiden visit to Kenya as president in 2015, President Barrack Obama noted that Kenyan law was discriminatory on the basis of sexuality. He compared discrimination against sexual orientation to racism. “When you start treating people differently not because of any harm they do to anybody, but because they are different, that is the path whereby freedoms begin to erode,” he said.
Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, with whom Obama was giving a press briefing at Statehouse on that day, reacted by saying LGBTQ was a non-issue in Kenya. President Uhuru said Kenyans simply do not recognize same-sex marriage, although, according to recent research, there are LGBTQ people in Kenya, and Africa for that matter.
In truth, it is disingenuous to claim that same-sex marriage is a western idea that was brought to Africa to corrupt African morality. Several researches suggest that homosexuality has long been part of African countries. African countries that have accepted this part of their history have revised their position on LGBTQ. In Africa, Angola, Botswana, Cape Verde, Gabon, Guinea Bissau, Lesotho, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, the Seychelles and South Africa have legalized homosexuality.
A total of 29 countries in the world recognize same-sex marriage. It is not difficult to note that Africa’s most vocal critics of homosexuality have a history of dictatorship, human rights abuse, corruption, genocide and crimes against humanity.
Former Gambia’s dictator Yahya Jammeh threatened homosexuals with murder. Robert Mugabe, who singlehandedly killed the Zimbabwean dream, is on record calling LGBTQ “people worse than dogs and pigs”. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, another one of Africa’s strong men with an impressive record of human rights abuse, was, at one point, it is said, considering instituting death penalty for homosexuals.
Chad’s Idriss Deby – who passed-on on April 20, 2021, a day after forcing himself on Chadians for the sixth time – the most violent dictator east of Sahara, led the campaign to criminalize sodomy in 2017. President Uhuru Kenyatta who purported to be speaking for Kenyans when he dismissed the question of LGBTQ as a non-issue in Kenya is himself an indictee of crimes against humanity. By stifling conversation on sexual orientation, most African states have created a repressive consciousness among their citizens through which SGBV flourishes.
A sexually repressed society produces individuals whose consciousness is divorced from the most pressing national issues of the day.
At least 140 million youth in Africa aged between 15-35 years are unemployed. According to African Development Bank Group, 263 million young people in Africa will lack an economic stake in the system by 2025.
Covid-19 has wreaked havoc in the entire global economy. Leading economies such as the U.S have felt significant impact, so have economies of global south countries particularly in Africa. But African economy wasn’t doing well even before Covid. Nearly 60 million children didn’t have food, according to African Child Policy Forum, and three in five youths were unemployed.
Theoretically, AfCFTA could as well be the best thing that happened to Africa after the end of direct colonialism. For instance, it’s projected to have significant impact on African economy by connecting the continent’s 1.3 billion people with an estimated combined gross domestic product of $3.4 billion.
Designed to create a single market that enjoys free movement of goods and services, AfCFTA is expected to eliminate 90 per cent of tariffs thus, basically, liberalizing trade in the continent.
Described by most experts as a revolutionary economic idea, the nascent trading bloc is additionally expected to increase Africa’s global export by $560 billion and intra-continental exports by 81 per cent. Similarly, it is estimated that the agreement will generate a combined consumer and business spending of staggering $6.7 trillion by 2030.
However, the economic reality on the ground makes the prospects of bringing AfCFTA agenda to fruition dim. Africa accounts for just five per cent of the global income despite making up to 16 per cent of the world population.
As International Monetary Fund observes, “Half of African countries (27), with 44.6 percent of Africa’s total population, are categorized as low income. The remainder is distributed between lower-middle-income (18 countries, with 45.9 percent of the population), upper-middle-income (8 countries with 9.5 percent of the population), and high-income (1 country with 0.01 percent of the population)”.
At least 140 million youth in Africa aged between 15-35 years are unemployed. And, according to African Development Bank Group, 263 million young people in Africa will lack an economic stake in the system by 2025.
While unemployment rate in Africa has decreased in the last nine years from 11.7% to 10.6%, the economy remains worryingly unsustainable. Bloomberg recently reported that South Africa had the highest unemployment rate in the world. Although the strength of the indicators understandably used to arrive at such a conclusion is open to question, more reliable sources report that 44 per cent of South African population is unemployed. That is worrying.
As historian Yuval Harari notes in 21 Lessons of the 21st Century: The economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants and return home after a hard day’s work with less food than did their ancestors.
While there are weighty factors such as systematic economic marginalisation that would affect the full implementation of AfCFTA’s core agenda – liberalization of trade in Africa – the question of social death remains a major factor that should be given adequate attention.
