The ANC Women's League (ANCWL) has blamed its parent body’s precarious finances for its shortcomings, citing the lack of financial support as its biggest challenge since 2018.

Things are so bad that the league’s secretary-general Meokgo Matuba has not received her full monthly stipend for over two years.

This is revealed in a report submitted to this weekend’s ANC national executive committee meeting about the state of the league.

It reveals that the ANCWL’s financial struggles started in January 2018, a month after the Cyril Ramaphosa-led national executive was elected at Nasrec where the league supported Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s candidacy.

“Since the election of the current ANC NEC, the ANC stopped allocating the ANCWL monthly funds as it was done previously since we were elected in 2015,” it said.

“From January 2018, we have been struggling and only received financial support once in a long while from the ANC.

“Currently, the secretary-general of the ANCWL has not been paid her top-up salary which she received from the ANCWL.”

The top-up is the stipend the ANCWL NEC agreed on after realising the gender pay gap and wage difference between the ANCWL secretary-general Meokgo Matuba and other full time ANC NEC members in Luthuli House, according to the league’s report.

It said the ANC underpays the ANCWL secretary-general and the women's league paid her a stipend to mitigate that.

“Due to lack of funding from the ANC, the ANCWL owes our SG 25 months of lack of payment of that stipend.”

Volunteers in the league’s offices who were paid monthly before the change of leadership in the ANC have not been paid for more than 15 months now, and have no other income outside this stipend.

“These conditions of lack of financial support by the ANC have made it difficult for us to work for the ANCWL.”

The lack of salary payment of ANC staff has also affected the ANCWL’s road map and audit process required ahead of its conferences as its membership is audited by ANC auditors who have been on strike since last year, reads the report.

“This greatly affected our time frames in terms of membership audit.”

The ANCWL was scheduled to elect new leadership in August 2020 when the five-year term of its leadership was due to end. But it said it could not convene its national conference due to factors that were not practically and legally enforceable.

Things are no better at provincial level as the terms of the league’s provincial structures have lapsed. With the exception of three provinces — North West, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng — all its provinces are led by task teams.

The majority of its provincial secretaries and co-ordinators were no longer full-time as per the constitution. They have since been deployed due to lack of income from the ANC and are also being underpaid compared to their male counterparts in the parent body.

The league also complained about how its members were overlooked during selection for councillor candidates ahead of last year’s local government elections.

It said the interviewing panels in regions and in a number of provinces were not “friendly to women” and that women were “mistreated” during ANC processes in some provinces while there were regions with no women councillors in KwaZulu-Natal, it claimed.

On the contrary, in the Free State, 60% of ANC councillors are women, some of them young women. This is cited as a success by the ANCWL.

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