INTRODUCTION
“Our revolution is not a public-speaking tournament. Our revolution is not a battle of fine phrases.
Our revolution is not simply for spouting slogans that are no more than signals used by manipulators trying to use them as catchwords, as code words, as a foil for their own display.
Our revolution is, and should continue to be, the collective effort of revolutionaries to transform reality, to improve the concrete situation of the masses of our country.“ — Thomas Sankara
Our discussion will be showing how pandemics have a general effect to exacerbate the pre-existing inequalities. This means that even with the Coronavirus, it will surely amplify the gender inequality in the world including in South Africa.
In late 2019, StatsSA released its inequality trends report that confirmed what came to be known as the triple challenge of poverty, inequality and unemployment which mainly affects women that are black, poor and in rural areas. So before Corona arrived in South Africa, women were already pre-disposed in their socio economic standing. The Hierarchy of vulnerability places women at the tail end of all these, thus the most exposed. We will discuss the following to explain what we mean.
ECONOMIC AND LABOUR DIMENSION
Unemployed women whose economic activity has been slowed down are left to lockdown with no possibility to look or find a job impossible. They remain condemned to social grants for those who qualify and receive, but its much worse for those not on social grants. A lot more survive on scouting for piece jobs daily of washing and cleaning, this will no longer be possible during the lockdown. These cannot afford to panic buy and stock no matter how threatened they are.
The women who sell food, fruit and veggies at the taxi ranks and streets usually target commuters who use public transport. Their biggest cash in time is during the social grant payment. While formal business and supermarkets were allowed to sell food, including fruit and veggies. No one thought about the informal traders until after more than 5 days into the lockdown. The sad part is that they lost out from the recipients of the social grant this month who usually buy from them. The worrying factor is that no one thought of safety measures that must be implemented in informal business without disrupting their trade. Most people who sell fruit and vegetables and cook by the street are single mothers who carry the burden of feeding their families from hand to mouth through the very business activities that were disrupted while capitalism continued to thrive and benefit from panic buying.
The sex workers who are mainly women are another sector that has not been considered or catered for during the lockdown. They live from hand to mouth and also have to provide for themselves and their families. With the lockdown, their activities have been suspended and it means no income to sustain and feed their families.
The general skills profile in South Africa shows a narrow percentage of skilled workforce with the majority being unskilled and low skilled, and at most being women (confirm with QLFS of StatsSA). This means that in the non-essential services as declared by lockdown, they are the primary victims of being locked down, and if the lockdown is extended, they may be the first to lose their jobs if companies restructure their operations due to the strain imposed by the lockdown.
Again, the majority of essential services workers in the supermarkets and in health are women especially nursing services. They are exposed to the virus as frontline staff and may be required to work extra hours, and institutions due to pressure unwilling to give leave. They are stretched to physical and emotional limits, still with additional burden of women duties in the home front. Others have young children, and employers may resist to give them family responsibility during this time. Other employers whose services are not essential to have forced their employees to take leave and besides announcements by our ministers, no mechanism has been put in place to ensure that workers are not being cheated.
Covid19 has exposed the unequal society we live in. It has posed a serious threat in informal settlements and townships were the poor and the working class live in crowded and hungry homes. The child headed households whose daily struggle is to at least have bread have had to consider buying soap and bleach in order to prevent against infection of this virus. The face of poverty is still a woman, meaning it is women that will have to oversee majority struggling families during this pandemic.
HEALTH DIMENSION
In SA the source of the virus has been from those that travel or are from other countries that infection has been high. This led to local infections that place an extreme health burden on women especially working class women. The case of a 28-year-old in Khayelitsha who works in suburbia and when she came back home in contact with her mother, child and nanny was discovered to be infected. She stayed for more than 24hrs in a local District Hospital under bad treatment where the hospital didn’t want to treat nor help her claiming they are not trained to treat Corona patients. Her 3-year-old suffered as she had to look after her child whilst being sick, and since all of them had to be tested they sat awaiting assistance.
Most of these women do not have medical aid and will have to rely solely on the services of the public institutions that are overburdened and slow to test and respond to the pandemic. This is not disregarding the efforts and the good work that is being done already by DOH. The case for NHI has never been more relevant than now. Covid19 is a compelling case for the urgent and swift implementation for NHI in the interest of poor women of our Country.
Until only today the 07th April 2020, baby clothes were not regarded as an essential need. Mothers always buy baby clothes only after they have delivered the baby, most expecting mothers only buy baby clothes after they have given birth, this is our reality. But when planning for the lockdown conditions, no one thought about this or reimagined this critical reality that becomes a burden on women as they nurse their newly born. We came across new mothers and those who were due reaching out to express this frustration. It was only attended to 12 days in to the lockdown.
SOCIAL DIMENSION
The Khayelitsha case exposed social challenges where this woman has been stigmatized and whilst in the hospital her landlord evicted her through a voice note, citing how she placed their family under risk. Such stigmatization led to another young woman from Nyanga who was mistaken to the Khayelitsha victim and started being harassed and went on social media to explain that she is Corona clean. Stigmatization by communities is not a new phenomenon as it was seen during the HIV/Aids virus where women were insulted and called names as having caught the virus supposedly due to promiscuity
The Minister of Police announced the alarming numbers of Women abuse and GBV during this lockdown period. A lot of people were shocked and they forgot that the Covid19 outbreak happened at a time when we were already in a war as a woman. A war that goes on year in and year out, women are dying in the hands of men, women are violated and dehumanised daily, every hour there is a woman dying in the hands of a man, and yet we have never given femicide this kind of attention and resources that we are giving to Covid19. No state of disaster is declared for GBV, the rich and the mighty do not rise to donate their billions to the fight against femicide. I am not trying to counter pose Covid19 against femicide but someone cannot help it but to observe how things are being done and to wonder why such kind of high-level dedication is not given to GBV.
Members of the LGBTQIA+ Community are also locked down in homes and places with people who are homophobic and continue to stigmatise them. Without a lockdown, they can go to school, work, and visit places that are conducive and less tense, but because of the lockdown, they will have to be in homes and communities with people that are homophobes and have no regard for other people’s sexual choices and preferences. This is when reality sinks in that our society needs a lot of transformation to be a better place for all of us to live in.
Just like the festive season, the 21 days lockdown is a time for servitude for women especially wives and daughters. Women who are usually rescued from house labour because of movement will this 21 days cook, clean, wash, iron and do all sorts of hard labour in the home while men enjoy watching TV, sleeping and acting to be busy. Patriarchy in the home will reinforce itself and when the lockdown is over, women would have fully served like they do during the festive season.
EDUCATION DIMENSION
The Corona Virus outbreak compels all children to find means to learn from home. What does that mean for working-class children? Some of their parents cannot read or write because we still struggle with literacy.. Many stay with grandparents particularly grandmothers. A smart cell phone with online facilities might seem like an easy gadget to own but not for rural parents and children. In cases where they have, it is not sophisticated enough to receive worksheets from school via WhatsApp and data bundles are a serious challenge.
Ever since schools closed due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus, our messaging has been to encourage online learning and the department of education sharing links to sites where learners can get study material. We disregarded the fact that it is difficult for a child who stays in an overcrowded home to study and pay attention uninterrupted. We further forgot that data bundles are a luxury to poor people and they stay in villages and areas where free wifi does not exist. With all the online facilities of study being made available, it means we are systematically excluding them. By the time schools are open, they will be behind compared to their counterparts who had access to data.
The other group we need to think about are learners who benefit from feeding schemes in schools. For some of these learners, the meal at school is the only guarantee meal that they have. Meals at home are usually uncertain because parents are unemployed or underemployed. The lockdown means that these children will be deprived of their only guarantee meal at school. The reliance on the School nutritional programmes by working class children is a serious reality we cant discount in our planning for the lockdown. The coronavirus impact on the Educational system will add to the stress and depression on women as they will carry this burden on their shoulders. A girl child in a household with an abusive father or uncle is now permanently exposed to the probability of being violated.
Worse their parents can not buy data bundles for them to access online learning material. With all this burden, the girl child will be subjected to house chores at home. Inevitably Children will not just go hungry but will be left behind on school work. Our schools must prepare for a proper catch-up programme for those who could not receive any work from home or those who had no literate elder to assist them with school work.
We must introduce the smart /e-learning from elementary schools and not only for times like these. This intervention must be first rolled out in all Rural areas ascending to cities and semi-urban areas. Interventions through online classes during the Covid19 pandemic that ignore the real conditions and lived experiences of the majority of South African children not only deny the working-class children the right to an equal education but also strengthens the Capitalist Social reproduction.
If we refuse to defy this trajectory and how it is shaping up, it will hit harder on the girl child and her mother as they will be forced back to the kitchen against their will. The reality is that not all girl children will return to school because of the harsh conditions they will have faced during the lockdown. Social workers should be finding smart ways of providing support for girls, women and household marred by domestic violence
CONCLUSION
What is glaring and will be confirmed by the Coronavirus is that if such a pandemic hits an unequal society and environment, women will be the ones to be extra burdened. Health, labour, social and economic implications suffered are severe based on the location and positioning of women in society. Never has the case for Gender equity been urgent than now.
We ought to call for structural gender reforms in transforming not only the form of society but its content such as the development paradigm, resource allocation mainframe and broad economic architecture as the only sensible solution to realise sustainable change. We have made an observation that most of the shortcomings of the Covid19 regulations as it pertains to women were not just simple oversights or mistakes but a pure reflection of the gender power relations and the lived experiences of poor women.
We must all adhere to the regulations that have been put in place and stay at home to reduce and cut the spread of Covid19. As the economic conditions get harsher on the majority poor women in our fight against Covid19, we can’t afford to have increased infections. Let us use water and the soap which we can afford to wash our hands and clean our environments. While it is difficult for black families staying in huge families and small houses to practice physical distance, let’s stay in our homes and with our families, it is better than to be on the streets as it puts our very families and poor communities at risk. Let us be safe as we continue to confront patriarchy and capitalism during this pandemic.
Our submission is that with all decisions that are still to be made in the fight against Covid19, let us put first and consider the poor black woman and interrogate what will be the implications of our decisions on the state of women. In our fight against this dangerous virus, we must not leave behind the marginalised groupings in society. We must fight GBV and Covid19 till we win.
Everything for the revolution and nothing against it.
Precious Banda is a member of the ANCYL NYTT and a former SASCO TG. She writes in her personal capacity