Nkosazana Dlamnini Zuma

New Delhi, July 18: Stirred by South Africa’s success in introducing women to top leadership positions, Sonia Gandhi now wants first-hand lessons from none other than the African National Congress when she visits that country in August.

South African foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamnini Zuma, in the capital for the India-Brazil-South Africa foreign ministerial meeting, was all set for a short courtesy call on the Congress president last evening.

But when Zuma began telling her about the ANC’s overwhelming success in introducing Black women to top leadership positions in business, politics as well as in the civil services, the meeting went on for more than an hour.

Zuma is believed to have told her: “India is a big country, you cannot change it much in five years. But what about the legacy you’re going to leave behind? You must introduce women to top leadership positions, so that they can exercise power.”

“Sonia Gandhi was over the moon about what we told her,’’ said Jerry Matsila, the foreign secretary of South Africa, a former high commissioner to India and a key figure in the ANC.

Sonia is going on a part-nostalgia, part-diplomatic trip to South Africa next month, where she will give a lecture in Cape Town, emphasise fraternal relations with ANC leaders, travel to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for 26 years and visit some sites around Durban that were frequented by Mahatma Gandhi.

Zuma’s vivid description about the ANC’s success in empowering Black women in the new South Africa seems to have the Congress president all charged up.

So at the ANC headquarters in Johannesburg, Sonia will be given a presentation of the South African story, complete with audits and checking mechanisms, Matsila said.

The Congress chief is believed to have briefly told Zuma about India’s intervention at the panchayat level — how 33 per cent women necessarily had to be elected as sarpanches.

But the South African minister simply smiled the Indian leader’s success away.

Then, she began to reel off the statistics: of South Africa’s 110 ambassadors, 39 were women, the largest number in the world. As much as 60 per cent of the $70-billion annual budget was in the hands of women ministers.

Moreover, a South African company could only bid for a state tender if at least 25 per cent of that company was held by women.

“In the last 13 years since South Africa became free in 1994, we have created a Black middle class that now accounts for 17 per cent of the population,’’ Matsila said, pointing out that a large percentage of them were now women.

So who was responsible for this? “It’s the ANC spirit of course,” said the foreign secretary.

“We fought for our country’s freedom, and now we know we have to build an egalitarian society. Mandela showed us the way. President Thabo Mbeki personally looks at updates on what and how his cabinet ministers are doing on this score. We know that empowering women is the only way to do it,’’ he said.