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.

We have a stinking piece of rotten meat on our moustache. The ‘lost’ politicians put it there. The intention is to produce the stench of tribal bias.

When you ‘smell’ a Kikuyu, he must have a stench, and when you smell a Luo, he should stink. But is this part of the male conspiracy? I have no idea. What I know is that the competitive nature of the ‘male’ species can result in anything.

The boy who put the rotten meat on his grandfather’s moustache was probably competing with another boy. And this competitiveness is insensitive and blind. I write to you therefore because CoE and PSC are nothing but ‘boyish’ clubs.

Conflict between them is just a ‘boyish’ fight; a struggle for power and significance. If you see it this way, you must also realise the following: we are not making a new constitution. This is a fat lie. We are weaving a succession plot for 2012.

This review process is nothing but raw politics. It is not about the country; just a fight between the ‘boys’. If this is true, I write to offer counsel.

One, we are lost. Instead of admitting this, we have become desperate for any constitution. But imagine 2011 with a new constitution, how will this change your lives? Zero. It will not.

In the meantime, if we do a referendum without consensus, we will repeat 2005. We will plant the seeds of the ‘big war’ in 2012.

Your bare minimum therefore should be this: “No Consensus, No Referendum!” Two, you should push for the disbanding of CoE.

The principle here is simple: if you remove one of the ‘boys’, the fight dies out. And since you cannot remove the PSC, you can lobby your political husbands to disband this committee. In my considered opinion, CoE is staging a civilian coup against the people of Kenya.

Instead of discussing its draft in Parliament on Tuesday therefore, someone should bring an amendment to the Act that created it. This way, the dramas would end! Three, you should lobby for the abortion of this draft. And on this, you do not need a lot of work.

I am persuaded that this is the path chosen by the President. In his shyness, he plans to kill the draft. The First Lady, Madam Lucy Kibaki should see to it! What is my point here?

Change never happens without the feminine touch. On your part you are missing in action; sleeping through the revolution!

Mutahi Ngunyi is a political scientist with The Consulting House, a policy and security innovation think-tank for the Great Lakes Region and West Africa.

Mutahi@myself.com