| Tanzania women politicians feel sidelined by media ahead of elections | Send to a friend |
| Saturday, 09 October 2010 22:18 |
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Dar es Salaam: Civic organisations in Tanzania have urged the media to give equal access to women and men politicians ahead of the country’s October 31, national elections to facilitate attainment of the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development’s goals of gender parity in political decision-making by 2015. The call comes after it was noted at a Gender, Media and Elections workshop, organised by Gender Links and Gender and Media Southern Africa (GEMSA) Tanzania Network, that women are being left out of media coverage of elections. A survey of daily election stories in local newspapers undertaken by participants has confirmed that the voices of women politicians in the media are negligible compared to men, who were found to dominate as sources and subjects of election stories. This corroborates the findings of the Gender and Media Progress Study conducted by Gender Links (2010), which revealed that women make up only 18per cent of sources in the political category. Tanzania currently has 30.7 per cent women in parliament as a result of a Parliament bill passed in 2000 to ensure that 30 per cent of the seats in parliament are reserved for women and apportioned to parties based on how many votes they garner in elections. The country’s mixed constituency and proportional representation system sets aside these seats but also allows women to contest for seats in the National Assembly. However, this is where women are facing challenges. In Lesotho, which has recently considered adopting the Tanzania model at the local government level, there is a history of controversy over affirmative action and a quota system which reserves one third of electoral seats exclusively for women candidates. However, because of this system Lesotho has the highest proportion of women in local government in the SADC region. Rwanda, which now leads globally as far as national women’s representation, has 56 per cent representation. South Africa is ranked second in Africa with 43 percent women in parliament. Unfortunately two countries – Botswana and Namibia – went backwards in recent elections, with Botswana now the SADC country with the lowest proportion of women in government. Participants agreed that Tanzania’s 30 per cent quota for women at national level is not enough to close the gap unless political parties put in place deliberate strategies to improve the lot of women politicians. They also expressed fears that the proportion of women in parliament is likely to decline if recent opinion polls are correct. While both journalists and civil society organisations at the workshop urged women to fully utilise the services of the media during this critical period, women politicians said the media must also seek out their views. Information shared among seminar participants showed that a very small percentage of women candidates in the upcoming elections have access to the media. Participants fear that if this situation is allowed to persist, the SADC Protocol’s target of equal representation of women and men in political decision making by 2015 may not be attained in Tanzania, since this is the last election before the target deadline. “Since the beginning of campaigns, I have not met a single journalist in my constituency, let alone been interviewed by the media,” said Modesta Makaidi, a candidate for the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Lulindi, Masasi District. “This situation has greatly hampered my efforts to reach a large section of the population in time.” The two-day Gender Links seminar is part of a larger commitment to empower citizens to hold media and governments accountable while striving for a Southern Africa in which women and men are able to participate equally in all aspects of public and private life. Source: Courtesy of Gender Links Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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