Lack of creativity and confidence constraining our female MPs

In a searing broadside, cultural analyst Joyce Nyairo recently tore into the women’s political leadership in an article that described them as “an unmitigated disaster” (Daily Nation, March 28). (READ: Women’s representatives are an unmitigated disaster)

Dr Nyairo was outraged that when the Marriage Bill was passed, the activists among the women legislators “had gone to New York to attend the two-week annual fete known as the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women”.

They were, therefore, not there to vote on the Bill that effectively stripped women in customary marriages of the least concession in such unions—that they be informed when another wife is on the way.

In traditional African marriage, a husband rarely took another wife without consulting his first wife. Many-a-time, it was indeed the first wife who proposed the need for a helper, usually her relative, because of increased workload, or their daughter was of marriageable age, and it was considered shameful for mother and daughter to be expectant or breastfeeding a baby at the same time.

By trooping to New York when their vote was needed to block the predominantly male House from denying them the least say in customary unions, the female lawmakers effectively sold fellow women’s birthright for a bowl of soup.

Dr Nyairo listed exemplary women who had left a mark on Kenya’s political scene, among them Ms Grace Onyango (Kenya’s first woman mayor and MP, Ms Phoebe Asiyo, who performed the unrivalled feat of dislodging then Kanu chairman David Okiki Amayo from the Karachuonyo seat, Dr Eddah Gachukia, whose name is synonymous with advancing girl child education in Kenya, and Dr Julia Ojiambo.

The latter was not only the first Kenyan woman to join government as assistant minister in the Third Parliament; she used the position to lobby for Kenya’s hosting of the landmark UN Decade for Women Conference in 1985.

So, what ails the current crop of women politicians?

Outspoken Presbyterian cleric Timothy Njoya says Kenyan women politicians have to be men first before they become women. Commenting on the perception that the affirmative action clause that had raised women’s numbers in Parliament had not translated into quality leadership—a view Dr Nyairo articulated in her brilliant commentary—the retired minister told this writer in an earlier interview:

“Personally, I am not scared by women being thugs and crooks and hooligans because these are the models of leadership in Kenya. We don’t want women to become robots. What we need is to deconstruct masculinity and make it human rights masculinity instead of dominant masculinity because for a woman to succeed in this country, she has to be a man... the women are playing the game according to men’s rules.”

Saying he did not condone theft, Dr Njoya argued: “We are not going to deconstruct women differently than we are deconstructing men. You have to deconstruct the whole masculine order. To succeed as a woman in Kenya, you have to be masculine. And that is the problem.”

IMPOSSIBLE TO DELIVER

In a recent interview with Ms Asiyo, she begged to differ with Dr Njoya. The woman, who quit politics in 1997 at the age of 67, when her constituents needed her most, told the Sunday Nation why she took the unusual decision.

Fiercely committed to her constituents’ welfare, she found it impossible to deliver when the Moi regime took it upon itself to frustrate her development efforts. Staying on as MP would have undermined Karachuonyo’s development, the champion of Kenya’s multiparty democracy said.

Ms Asiyo recalled how a pottery kiln she built with a UN agency’s funding to create employment for Karachuonyo youth was blown up.

On another occasion, the Kendu Bay Rural Electrification Project that she started with the Ambassadors Fund was stillborn after Government diverted the funds to the Rift Valley, then President Moi’s home province.

Noting that affirmative action had significantly changed women’s leadership landscape, Ms Asiyo was disappointed that female MPs were not taking advantage of the situation to better women’s lot. At a time Turkana is in the grips of starvation, women lawmakers seem aloof. “Women in leadership cannot act like men. Women see and feel differently. I would want to see them do things differently,” she said.

Ms Asiyo challenged the Kenya Women Parliamentarians Association to lobby around bigger issues—like the raging wage bill debate, on which their silence, just like their male counterparts’—has been deafening.

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