25 Nov 2018

The minister of Nationality, Immigration and Gender Affairs, Ms Dorcas Makgato, has called on women to take gender based violence (GBV) head on.

Speaking during the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) women high tea in Gaborone on Saturday, Minister Makgato, who is also the BDP Women’s Wing chairperson, said GBV was a topical issue that should be dealt with openly.

She stated that breakthrough regarding GBV would come when women started to have difficult conversations that they had been putting under the table.

“We must be comfortable enough as women to say as women we need to be assisted, to be facilitated to discover ourselves, we must believe in ourselves as women, this is the strongest weapon for us to be able to advance where we want to go,” she said.

Ms Makgato reiterated that for women to win the fight against GBV, it was pertinent for them to start with gaining understanding of who they were, where they would like to go, what they would like to be and how they were going to get there.

Speaking on behalf of Women Against Rape (WAR), Ms Peggy Ramaphane, called on those in positions of leadership to stand up for women and girls.

“We want all leaders to protect us, to give us our rights. We want us to shift from the social norms that we are so comfortable in. We want to challenge gender inequality to transform patriarchy to bring about equality,” she stated.

To win war against GBV, Ms Ramaphane called for multi-sectional interventions to promote gender equality.

Furthermore, she warned that political parties that did not cater for women would be denied their vote.
 

“As we move towards elections, we will be looking at political party manifestos to see what they have for us otherwise we withdraw our votes as women,” she said.

Ms Ramaphane advised that mobile courts, which had been availed for livestock theft, should also be availed to attend to cases of GBV to ensure more legal accessibility in such cases.

For her part, chairperson of Business Union South Africa, Advocate Brenda Madumise who led the revolutionary tilted #Thetotalshutdown under the slogan ‘my body not your crime scene,’ said the movement started on the first of August 2018.

She said the GBV awakening journey which started on Facebook had been challenging, rewarding and painful.

“The women who marched had undergone the pain.

We were resolute that no one was going to dictate to us what we should say and how we are going to share it.

When we marched to the Union Building, to Parliament, Supreme Court of Appeal we had 24 demands in hand that we wanted the state to adhere to,” she said.

Advocate Madumise said the main reason for the protest was that despite the fact that the country had the best policies and legislation ever, it had failed the women and children.

She said the constitution guaranteed bill of rights such as the right to life, right to associate, but on a daily basis there were cases of women being raped, killed, and sexually molested even though there was the domestic violence act, the sexual offenses act but they were not helping. Ends