Women's Leadership Is Under Attack Globally

We caught up with former Malawian President Joyce Banda in Johannesburg just before her return to Malawi in April after four years away. One of four female presidents Africa has had, she spoke about her plans but is guarded about her return to politics.

- Joyce Banda

DURING HER TIME AWAY from Malawi, Joyce Banda served as a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in the United States, and has just finished writing a book, From Day One, on the issues around women and the girl child. She spoke to FORBES WOMAN AFRICA:

What are you looking forward to and how does it feel?

I am so happy I have done all I wanted to do and am going home.

There’s much excitement in Malawi... I guess I am the only one not excited… It has been a week of hype and I am totally surprised and humbled because I didn’t know just how much Malawians love me.

We don’t have any female presidents on the continent at the moment… why are there so few women in politics?

Women’s leadership is under attack globally. Start from Australia, look at what happened to Julia Gillard. And you go to Thailand and look at what happened to the former Prime Minister…

I’ve been speaking a lot in the US and the question I always ask is ‘tell me why [as] the oldest democracy for 200 years, you have not managed to have one woman in state house’?

Coming back to Africa, we haven’t done badly, at least we had four women. We went to Beijing in 1995; we agreed that it was part of the work plan that we are going to come back and get into leadership.

I remember asking Mrs Gertrude Mongella, who was the Secretary-General of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women: ‘because men are already sitting in the seats, how can we go to parliament?’ They said ‘go and push them if you have to’. And we went home, tried our level best and got into leadership.