As AU places women’s hoe in museum

’Tunji Ajibade

Some say women get to office and forget their constituency. No one can suggest such about Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma. The passion of this first female chairperson of the African Union Commission to improve the condition of her fellow African women is well-known. The other time, her commission held its ordinary summit of Heads of State and Governments in South Africa

. Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari was there, and he had delivered so crisp an address to fellow leaders that I almost stood up to clap. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was present too and he chaired occasions in his capacity as the chairman of the AU. I took note of some of the ironic comments he made that time, although examining them under a magnifying glass was a scheduled task I had yet to execute. Mugabe chaired a particular session where Zuma had engaged in a battle on behalf of women. Zuma said her commission had been giving thought to how it could improve the condition of the African woman. The African woman works on a farm, straps a baby to her back and yet holds a hoe to engage in tilling of the earth for her meager crop. This must change, she said.

One way to make the job of the African woman less dreary, Zuma added, was to take the hoe from her hands and give her a tilling implement (it comes in different categories with different price tags) which takes out the physical exertion the hoe imposes. Zuma had invited Mugabe to the podium, as well as the New Economic Partnership for African Development chairperson, President Macky Sall of Senegal, and handed over one tiller each to them. She said she was launching the tilling implement, that 54 pieces were available, and that one would be given to each African Head of state to take back home and spread its type to women. With the formal handing over of the traditional hoe of the African woman to Mugabe and Sall, Zuma said the hoe was symbolically placed in a museum. Now, Zuma’s effort to get something done for African women is good. Her move to stir Africa’s political leaders to key into the initiative is also commendable. Of concern to me however is how this effort would go beyond the formal ceremony that took place in South Africa. I look at this from two perspectives.

While I confess to not being aware of other details that may surround the implementation of this initiative by the AU Commission, I call attention to the challenges that confront such development projects on the continent with a view to avoiding them. One, there’s a challenge to the introduction of solutions from the top to the bottom as this one appears to be. There’s also the angle of introducing an initiative without ensuring that African governments key it into some local programmes that are of interest to them. There’s the aspect of failing to get the concerned segment of the local population to key into an initiative and see it as theirs. Aside from these, there’s the inevitable question: What is the long term plan for this initiative, and how sustainable is it? These are key to the success of this project that touches the lives of so many African rural women that make a living directly from the soil. Zuma said the tillers were a donation from a European government. This too raises more questions:

Will the country that donates be the supplier subsequently? Will the country supply the tillers free to every African woman that farms, or will she have to purchase it? How much will it cost to purchase the simplest and the cheapest of the tillers? Who will fund the purchase, the rural woman who will find it cheaper and easier to get the locally made hoe from a local blacksmith, or the government that will have to prepare a budget annually and wait for the foreign suppliers to import the tillers before they are made available for purchase? These questions drive towards other fundamental issues. All of them are meant to ensure that even if the AU Commission manages to persuade governments on the continent to get committed to it, it will not nevertheless fall by the wayside, never to be heard of anymore as has been the fate of most development projects in recent past.

Facts show that three out of every four development projects in Africa fail. Why do they fail? One important reason is that when projects are seen to completion and are operationalised, sustaining them is a challenge. Sustainability becomes a challenge if, from the stage of conception, how to keep a project running in the long term is not taken into consideration. When it is, new challenges arise, and coupled with a prevalent culture of lack of integrated approach to sustaining development projects, they die an untimely death. A reason for this is that necessary dimensions to sustaining such projects are overlooked. One of such is institutional sustainability, that is a functional institution which devises means by which a project self-sustains after the initial dose of funding stops. There is also the aspect of the household or community involvement which ensures that concerned community anticipates and adapts to changes in order to keep a project going. There is as well the aspect of environmental sustainability; the changing structural dimensions of poverty, for instance, that may wipe out initial capital outlay and other inputs especially among the poor and marginalised rural population such as those for which the AU Commission adopts tillers. I have taken a look at one category of the tillers that the AU gives out; I wonder about its durability in the rugged terrain where it is to be used, and how much it may cost to repair or keep it functional in comparison to the cheaper hoe that the rural woman is familiar with.

Where the above argument is going could be seen in the following example of a project introduced from outside, and in which the matter of sustainability had been taken for granted. Notably, the example is from one of the few countries on the continent – Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt – where there’s better expectation that development project should work. Microsoft’s digital villages, part of South Africa’s rural tech initiatives, were established in 1997. That year, Microsoft’s boss, Bill Gates, visited South Africa’s black township of Soweto. It’s an example of a town of extreme poverty where many black children have no hope of owning a computer. The Soweto project was South Africa’s first free-access “digital village,” and the idea was that by providing computers, housed in the Community Centre, it would give the township’s poor residents a better link to the information age. Gates said that much at the time. Years later, the “digital villages” across South Africa have practically disappeared. The project had worked well until the sponsors stopped funding the activities, and the community couldn’t make use of the technology in a self-sustaining way.

I’m not too sure how much institutional and financial capacity the AU Commission has to follow through this tiller project for the rural women. Knowing though that the commission depends on the cooperation of governments to get anything done, one is apprehensive. Everyone knows that governments on the continent don’t handle well most development initiatives, yet it’s to them the commission has turned to get this initiative across to women. As I write, I imagine where the public servants who took charge of the tillers, after their Heads of State ceremonially collected the implements from Zuma, had dumped them. They must have been placed in abandoned storerooms, or somewhere under the open heaven where they are already forgotten. I wished Zuma linked this initiative to a programme that’s handled at a level lower than the office the Heads of State; maybe, get Heads of State to key it into one of the major agricultural programmes of their countries at a ministerial level while the AU gradually sorts out the detail of how the tillers can be made available as its popularity is gradually spread among women. Except this is done, I’m concerned that the European nation that donates the tillers may comb the continent for them in the next few years and may not find just one in the hands of any African woman tilling her field.