POLITICS-MALI: Bracing for “Zero to Six” in Parliamentary Elections

By Almahady Cissé Reprint | | Print |

Almahady Cissé

BAMAKO, Jul 22 2007 (IPS) - A fear has been voiced that the number of women in Mali’s parliament could be more than halved during legislative elections that wrapped up Sunday.

Parliamentary polls in this West African country require voters to cast ballots for party lists of candidates that have been submitted for constituencies. In the event that no list receives a majority of votes, a run-off poll is held between the two lists that gained the most ballots. The party whose list wins a majority of votes in the second round is then allowed to fill every seat in the constituency from persons on that list.

Independent candidates are allowed to contest seats in single-member constituencies, where a run-off will also occur in the absence of a majority being garnered during the first round of polling.

None of the 227 female candidates standing in this year’s ballot won a seat in the first round of elections Jul. 1, and only 26 were on lists put to the vote Sunday (in all, 1,408 people contested the legislative poll).

“It’s a set-back,” admitted Korotoumou Mariko-Thera, spokeswoman for the Framework for Co-operation of Women in Political Parties, and an unsuccessful candidate in the first round of elections. “In the best case we’ll have 13 women elected with this number (26). In the worst case, we will be in a range of zero to six women,” she told IPS.

There are 14 women in the country’s outgoing, 147-seat parliament. When democratic elections were held in Mali in 1992 after years of one-party rule, only two women were elected to parliament. In 1997, that number increased to 18, but fell in 2002.

“The first aspect is sociological and is linked to the views on female leadership in Malian society. Nowhere in our villages do you see a woman as village head,” he said.

The second factor relates to what Sagara describes as the weak fighting spirit of women during elections. Thirdly, “women lack confidence in themselves, in general” he says, adding that this deprives them of their ability to lead.

These views are echoed by Bocary Daou, a political analyst and journalist, who also highlights the part that men play in the political marginalisation of women: “Male politicians…really don’t want to cede anything to women in terms of responsibility. The other aspect is cultural…In the popular imagination, the power of women is evil.”

According to a 2006 government study on women’s access to decision-making bodies in Mali, women have an overall representation in these groupings of just 10.79 percent: 9.52 percent in parliament, 18.51 percent in the cabinet, less than one percent of mayoral posts, and under seven percent of councillors’ posts.

One of the eight candidates that contested presidential elections held in April and May was a woman (see ‘POLITICS-MALI: A Presidential Election That Breaks With Tradition’), while just over 16 percent of candidates in this year’s legislative elections were women.

Under pressure from women’s associations and movements, government tried to include a clause in electoral legislation tabled last year that would have prevented more than 70 percent of candidates on party lists from being of the same sex. But after a stormy debate Aug. 15, 2006, the law was voted in without this clause.

For her part, Mariko-Thera points a finger at lack of funding for women candidates.

“People do not vote out of conviction. At all levels, you must produce money…We are in a system where the candidate who has many more means, succeeds,” she noted, adding that women also needed to gain the support of leading parties. “Women are not on the serious lists, meaning the lists of the big parties that will give them a much better chance of being elected. They are most often either on independent lists, or on the lists of small political parties.”

It was to increase the participation of women in legislative and council elections that female members of political groupings joined hands four years ago to create the Framework for Co-operation of Women in Political Parties.

According to Bintou Sanankoua, general secretary of the Network of African Women Ministers and Parliamentarians, and a former Malian legislator, “Women are valuable in politics and their presence can moralise public life as they are mothers, guardians of tradition, and have many scruples. Their presence also may also contribute to the rehabilitation of politics that people have a tendency to trivialise today.”

“Fundamentally, the presence of women can change everything,” noted Sanankoua, this during a recent round table discussion in Mali’s capital, Bamako.

Just over six million of the country’s 13.8 million citizens were registered to vote in Sunday’s poll.

Mali is one of the poorest states in the world, with 72.3 percent of its people living on less than a dollar a day, according to the 2006 United Nations Human Development Report, and 90.6 on less than two dollars a day.