While life teaches us that politicians cannot be trusted and that hypocrisy is their stock-in-trade, one would have to wonder about the sincerity of our ANC government when it comes to gender-based violence and the rights of women and children.
Every year, we bemoan the fact that South African men are some of the most awful abusers on the planet. And, every year, someone like President Cyril Ramaphosa stands up to say – as he did at this week’s GenderBased Violence Summit in Johannesburg – that eradicating violence against women and children should be the “foremost priority”.
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At the same time, neither Ramaphosa, nor anyone in the ANC had anything to say about the thousands of people who are being detained in Iran for protesting the death in custody of Mahsa Amin, a 22-year-old woman arrested by the country’s “morality police” for not being modestly dressed.
While this is probably just another case of the ANC not wanting to offend anyone – even the most brutal of regimes – the silence from our government is deafening, especially as we consider the effects of treating women as second-class citizens, as they do in Iran.
The abuse of one woman is the abuse of all women.