This year will usher in a new, yet challenging era for the ANC. From the outset, its newly elected leadership - with Cyril Ramaphosa at the helm - will have to grapple with the daunting and complex task of determining the future of its former president and current deployee to the highest office in the land, Jacob Zuma.
Many in the country are in agreement that much as Zuma’s legal chickens are increasingly coming home to roost, his removal might prove easier said than done, given that the man has successfully used patronage and political mastery to entrench himself inside the ruling party.
Indeed, headaches don’t come any bigger than this, but one trusts that Ramaphosa’s fabled talents as a master strategist and negotiator will help the ANC navigate the treacherous road ahead.
Apart from cleaning up his mess, the ANC will have to allow and enable a parallel conversation to unfold within it - the gender parity question as well as the ascendancy of female cadres to its highest echelons.
A good point of departure would be an acknowledgement of the seriousness and strategic importance of this issue; and that it must be carefully managed and no longer be left to chance.
Though this ought to be a holistic and organisation-wide conversation, the ANC Women’s League, and women in general in the party, must lead from the front and push to catapult the gender parity question to the top of its agenda.
The 40-odd women serving on the national executive committee must ensure that this is an imminent item on all programmes of the ANC and present at all levels of the organisation.
An ideal start may be to ask the pertinent, albeit difficult questions about the apparent leadership bankruptcy of the executive team of the women’s league.
The recent abortive campaign to get Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma elected as party president at the 54th Elective Conference at Nasrec in Johannesburg, exposed its lack of depth, wisdom and political savvy.
The equal lack of courage by league members across the country to stand up to the bully who is their president was too palpable and, quite frankly, shameful.
If ANC women want to have a real chance at advancing the struggle for gender parity, they should start by pushing for the fall of Bathabile Dlamini and her entire executive. If not immediately, then surely at the next elective conference of the women’s league.
This lot is the weakest link in the struggle for gender parity in the ANC and in the country - and it will be foolhardy to attempt to build anything solid on so shaky a foundation.
They must be told in no uncertain terms that blaming the loss of the conference to patriarchy is a futile attempt to divert attention from the real source of the failure - themselves.
The decision to impose a candidate without consultation and buy-in from the league’s lower structures, the choice of discredited characters to be faces and mouthpieces of the campaign, a misguided focus on attacking and vilifying Ramaphosa instead of running an issue-based and principled campaign, the failure to recognise and endorse the two other female contenders, were all harbingers of a campaign doomed to fail.
To make matters worse, none of the respected and powerful females in and outside the ANC lent their voices and faces to this campaign - a strong indicator that it was not premised on the principle of advancing the gender parity struggle.
On the contrary, it affirmed a widely-held perception that the NDZ campaign was nothing more than an attempt by Zuma to secure a third term by proxy.
Granted, NDZ is an established politician in her own right, with unquestionable Struggle credentials and an equally impressive public service record to her credit.
Some even attest that she is a hard worker with a reputation for being intolerant of corruption.
It then boggles the mind where these attributes were when Dlamini, Sisi Ntombela, Nomvula Mokonyane, Kebby Maphatsoe, Collen Maine and Carl Niehaus were running amok at the height of her campaign, displaying nothing but arrogance, condescension and impugning the reputations of others? Did her silence in the midst of all this madness signify ignorance or collusion?
I am inclined to believe the latter. Otherwise, how do we explain her deafening silence, particularly since most of their conduct was displayed right before her very eyes and ears at gatherings where she was present?
Second, the women who are in the NEC must lead the charge in ensuring that the ANC puts a significant number in charge of key levers of power and participation - in NEC committees and sub-committees, in all government structures at national, provincial and local level, in provincial and regional structures; including ambassadorial deployments.
This way, the ANC will be certain that it has laid a solid preparatory ground for female cadres to thrive.
In a few provinces and regions, the ANC has an opportunity to elect new leaders as a result of vacancies left open by the election of former incumbents to the national structures and the nullification of conference outcomes by the courts.
This presents a golden opportunity for the league and other women to push harder for equitable gender representation to be made a reality. If their call was as genuine as they would have us believe, then it would not be unreasonable of us to expect to hear calls for female chairpersons in KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State and Mpumalanga; as well as female regional chairpersons in Bojanala and Tshwane, whose conference is around the corner.
Surely, even the Youth League, which is going to conference very soon, should be impressed upon to put its money where its mouth is - and advocate for the election of young lioness cadres at its helm and other key positions in its top five.
This, indeed, is a golden opportunity for all those who advanced the gender ticket in the run-up to the conference to redeem themselves.
All of these, of course, cannot happen without women taking an active interest in, and taking the lead in the struggle for gender parity.
It must begin with them swelling the ranks of the ANC at branch level to influence the programmes of the party and to ensure that more and more women make up delegations deployed to conferences.
If fewer and fewer women attend the conferences, I am afraid that getting women cadres to ascend the organisation’s higher echelons will be left to those who are not beneficiaries; and it may therefore remain just a pipe dream.
Ramotshela is a member of the Unisa branch of Nehawu and writes in his personal capacity