Mr Manana assaulted three women in August 2017, for which he was found guilty, and more recently, is alleged to have pushed his female employee down a flight of stairs, and then attempted to pay her off to avoid facing further criminal charges and a further conviction. He is also alleged to have assulted two women in a parking lot in Ermelo.
South Africa has a horrific record of gender-based violence, with at least one in five adult women having been victim to physical violence, a number that rises when verbal and other forms of abuse are taken into account. Furthermore, South Africa has to deal with the horrific scourge of 'corrective' rape and other extreme acts of violence committed against women in general and black women in particular.
We call on the Parliamentary Committee on Ethics and Members' Interests to take urgent action, as political leaders should not be above the law and should be examples to society, not shamefully engaged in violent acts of gender-based violence.
We further call on all political parties to include acts of gender-based violence as misconduct in their codes of conduct for their members.
Only with collective action by civil society, NGOs and all political organisations in South Africa, will we be able to confront the scourge of gender-based violence.