Gender Barriers Persist Within South Africa's Political Elite, Officials Acknowledge

Nomvula Mokonyane entered anti-apartheid resistance at age 15. Decades later, as the ANC’s second deputy secretary-general, she is still describing women’s political participation as “a struggle within a struggle,” a phrase that captures how institutional progress and personal vulnerability continue to coexist inside South Africa’s governing structures.

Mokonyane’s characterization, offered to journalists this week, goes to the heart of an accountability question that senior ANC figures are increasingly willing to name openly: why do women who hold formal office still carry burdens that their male counterparts do not? The answer, in her framing, is structural. Women in leadership must continuously establish legitimacy, build coalitions, and justify their authority in ways the institution does not routinely demand of men. That ongoing requirement can isolate them from male colleagues and, she noted, from other women as well.

Additional reference context is available at https://mg.co.za/politics/2026-08-06-women-in-politics-face-a-struggle-within-a-struggle/.

Her own trajectory through those formal structures is instructive. Mokonyane moved from the Young Christian Students movement and the Congress of South African Students through Gauteng’s premiership, which she held from 2009 to 2013 as the province’s first female premier, then through three ministerial portfolios before her election as second deputy secretary-general at the ANC’s 2022 national conference. Each step was institutional. Each required navigating the same pressures she now describes.

Since 1994, she acknowledged, significant policy steps have advanced women’s empowerment. The gaps, however, are in translation: turning legislative gains into material security. Gender-based violence and sexual harassment remain live accountability failures. Mokonyane cited the Selby Mbenenge matter and the Jacob Zuma rape case as evidence that institutional accountability is incomplete even when prominent judges and former leaders face allegations. Economic independence, she argued, is the precondition for structural progress to mean anything durable.

The societal context compounds those institutional shortcomings. Despite sustained educational investment in girls, cultural norms continue to position women as subordinate. Mokonyane also pointed to a parallel institutional consequence on the other side: reduced attention to boys has contributed to bullying, gang rape driven by peer pressure, and drug involvement rooted in social messaging that discourages emotional expression. These dynamics, she suggested, require consistent intervention from the household level upward.

Meanwhile, a separate controversy inside ANC leadership structures illustrated how narratives about women in politics can themselves become governance matters. Phophi Ramathuba, the ANC’s provincial chairperson in Limpopo, attributed the downfall of female leaders to romantic relationships with younger men, arguing that women lose power when they become involved with what she called “Ben 10s.” She credited her own political longevity to avoiding such entanglements.

The ANC Women’s League’s national executive committee treated Ramathuba’s remarks as an institutional matter requiring a formal response. Secretary-general Nokuthula Ngaba stated that the comments were inappropriate and risked damaging organizational unity and the public image of women in leadership. The league indicated that formal engagement with Ramathuba would follow, a signal that the organization views the statements as falling within its mandate to address, not simply as one official’s opinion.

Mokonyane reframed the underlying issue in terms of exploitation rather than age. Men in relationships with much younger partners, she observed, typically receive social celebration rather than censure. That double standard is embedded in both institutional culture and broader social attitudes. The problem, in her analysis, is power imbalance regardless of the genders or ages involved, and she urged women to define themselves through their contributions and stakes in society rather than through externally imposed characterizations.

What the conversation reveals is a governance gap that policy frameworks alone have not closed. Electoral positions and formal mandates do not automatically produce secure authority or freedom from exploitation. The question left open is whether the ANC’s institutional mechanisms, including the Women’s League’s stated intention to engage Ramathuba formally, are adequate to address pressures that operate as much through informal social norms as through any rule that a regulator or oversight body can enforce.