#FRONTROW: A woman president? Not in Kenya for ages to come

Martha Karua got only 0.36 per cent of the votes cast for president in 2013, though she had been a highly public justice and legal affairs minister who famously quit the government. She was third-last with only 43,881 votes.

In comparison, Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga both managed more than five million votes each, according to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.

When Nazlin Umar ran for president in 2007, she ended up with a negligible 0.09 per cent of the votes. Only 8,624 people voted for her, yet both Mwai Kibaki and Odinga got more than four million votes.

Looking at these numbers, it is easy to say that a woman would never be elected to the highest office in Kenya whether she is prominent or unknown. Ms Karua went in with near-universal name recognition, a fairly well-known party, and years of public service.

Ms Umar didn’t quite have the same profile six years earlier when she took a stab at moving into State House. Either way, it says something about the people who vote, if the last two women to run for president in Kenya both performed so badly.

Exactly a week from today, the world will know whether Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the next president of the United States. She has already made history as the first woman selected by a major American party to run for president.

She is a heartbeat away from being crowned “leader of the free world” if Donald Trump can stop heckling her long enough for her to make her pitch. If she is elected on November 8, it will compete a trifecta of powerful global leaders.

The first two are German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May. It would probably be a remarkably different conversation if the former US first lady were running to be CEO of the Republic of Kenya Ltd.

SEXIST MALE POLITICIANS

All the sexist male politicians would suddenly realise that she is a woman, as if that somehow disqualified her for high office. The false argument that the woman representative position was created specifically so women wouldn’t run for other posts worked well in 2013.

That is why not a single female governor was elected countrywide. Aside from that affirmative action, a record 86 women were either elected or nominated to the eleventh Parliament.

“This number surpasses the total number of women representatives in the 50 years of independence combined,” says a March 2015 report by the Association of Media Women in Kenya.

“In the last 10 Parliaments, Kenya has had a total of 75 women, 50 of them elected while the other 25 were nominated.”

It is easy to use facts like these to point out that we’re inching closer to gender equality in representation. To take them at face value would be missing the point, though. The last election pushed Kenya to position 76 among the top 100 countries in the World Classification of Women in National Parliaments.

The National Assembly is still 81 per cent male while the current Senate is 73 per cent male. These are the same men who traversed the country asking the electorate not to support women for their positions because they had been given “their” seat.

They are some of the men who run physically violent, misogynistic campaigns that forced some women to withdraw or were directly responsible for their poor showing.

If Mrs Clinton were running for president in Kenya, the fact that she is a woman would probably be her greatest undoing. Many men — and some women — would proudly declare that State House is no place for a woman.

They are happy to praise First Lady Margaret Kenyatta for bringing grace, poise and class to the position but they would probably abandon her if she were to run for her husband’s job.

These bigots proudly support Rachel Ruto’s work around women’s empowerment and microlending but wouldn’t be too happy to see her ascend to the topmost political position.

In a way, some of the nastiness Donald Trump has shown towards Mrs Clinton is probably for the same reason — he doesn’t believe a woman should be president. He likes his women as trophy wives, and those whose bodies he can grab and then lie about it ever having happened and threaten to sue.

There are double standards regarding the way women leaders are treated by the public, and especially by men. Nowhere is the outdated system of patriarchy more alive than in politics.

Africa has had some female heads of state like Joyce Banda and the pioneering Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, but even their elections don’t appear to have done much to change the public tide.

Considering how the last four men who ran the country did, isn’t it time to elect a female president and see the difference?

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Somebody, please buy Twitter

Twitter is shutting down Vine, the website and app where people went to make six-second videos that looped forever.

“Twitter built up Vine to leapfrog Instagram and cultivated star users,” the New York Times pointed out in a story that tracked the microblogging site’s four-year odyssey with the app.

They could have spun it and sold it off to somebody but they haven’t been getting a lot of suitors lately. It is truly a sad day for a major global company if Pornhub, of all places, is the one that offers to buy a once prized possession.

“Six seconds is more than enough time for most people to enjoy themselves,” the adult site’s Vice-President Corey Price said. 

Twitter’s own future still hangs in the balance and it has announced that it is cutting nine per cent of its staff. In the meantime, it is focusing a lot more attention on livestreaming and its Periscope app, which is used by both ordinary accounts and broadcasters like NTV.

“Vine’s dead. Is Twitter next?” wondered a CNN Money article. “Vine suffered for Twitter’s muddled product vision, inability to keep up with competitors and unclear path to mainstream success,” it explained.

Someone, please buy Twitter because I’d like to keep having it.

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We have taken oversharing to ridiculous levels

While his fiancée, Nicole Tock, was in labour, DJ Khaled was on Snapchat documenting the birth of their first child. Keep in mind that the music producer is 40 years old, not some twentysomething. He even had time to do a mini photoshoot as one picture he posted on Instagram showed.

A few days later, a Kenyan newspaper reported that a nominated MCA accidentally sent a nude picture of herself to a WhatsApp group of her colleagues.

It was a stray chat, of course, but why was it being sent in the first place? It seems that there is nothing that is intimate or private anymore until it is shared with the whole world.

If an occasion happened and it was not on Facebook, had no retweets or Instagram likes, did it really happen? Overshare has always been a quality of social media but the levels to which people will go to get attention keep surprising.