Women should step in to save review from the ‘boys’

• Process is nothing but raw politics and a fight between the male politicians

This is a letter to the women of Kenya. I write to you because the men are lost. And typical of men, they will not ask for direction.

Not only in politics, but also in their biology. In his book, The Seduction of Socio-biology, R.C Francis asks a simple question: “...Why does it take millions of sperms to fertilise only one egg?” He answers: “...the sperm will not stop to ask for direction!” And this is ‘maleness’ for you.

A man and all his elements is constituted to ‘know’. If he does not know, he feels incompetent, helpless and insecure. It is therefore important to understand that a man is never ‘lost’.

In fact, the two principals are not lost. They are just unsure of where they are at the moment! And this is why I write to you.

I have three concerns. One, the men have led the constitutional review process for 20 years. In these years, they have failed. Now the search has changed gears. We are no longer searching, we are desperate. We have searched for 20 years and we must end this process.

This is why we need a new constitution: Desperation. And on this, we are damn wrong. We are not desperate, we are just lost.

The reason why we have taken 20 years is because we got lost in the wilderness and did not ask for direction.

Imagine if Moses in the Holy Bible got lost in the Wilderness. What would he do? If he was a Kenyan politician, he would cheat us.

Instead of doing 40 years in the wilderness, he would tell us that 20 years in the wilderness was enough. Then he would convince us that the wilderness is part of the Promised Land.

Instead of going to Canaan, the hot desert was okay. And this is how we must view the constitutional review process.

We got lost somewhere. Instead of admitting this, we convinced ourselves that the draft constitution was okay. Because we must end the 20 years of searching, we decided to settle for a mediocre constitution. This, in my view, is treason.

I write to you, therefore, to find out if I am wrong. Are we lost? Are we accepting half-baked measures to prove that we are not? If we are lost, we must abandon the draft constitution!

My second reason is tribe. We are ashamed of tribe, yet it is who we are. The question is: is negative ethnicity a male construct? I tend to think so. And with your indulgence, I will explain.

The story is told of a little boy and his cranky grandfather. One Sunday afternoon, the boy waited for the grandfather to take a snooze.

As he slept, the boy took a piece of rotten meat and placed it on the grandfather’s thick moustache. The Mzee did not notice. He continued to enjoy his nap.

But all of a sudden, he was woken up by a stinking stench. Then he exclaimed, “...this room stinks!”

In protest, he walked out to the next room. The stench was even worse. Desperately, he made his way to the outside. While out there, he exclaimed; “...the whole world stinks!”

For the rest of the Sunday, everything had a nasty stench. And this is the story of our politics.