No, nobody should actually ‘run for woman rep’

Nairobi Woman Representative Rachel Shebesh in the county on April 28, 2017. PHOTO | JEFF ANGOTE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Precisely what does it mean to run for woman rep”?

  • Does it mean to run on behalf of a “woman rep”?

  • Or does it mean mean to outrun even Kipchoge Keino in your chase after called Rachel Shebesh?

What on earth is a “woman rep”? I ask because that phrase is beginning to confront me from the pages of all our newspapers. Moreover, I ask for the sake of English speakers who come to our country for the first time and, on arrival, buy copies of our newspapers. I plucked that petal from the rose garden of language (page 5 of the Daily Nation of May 31), where a headline marched like a column of Hitler’s soldiers: “One fails IEBC test as tens are cleared to run for woman rep”.

The question confronts you like Medusa’s very face. Why would anybody want to run for “woman rep”? Nay, what on earth is a woman rep? What does it mean to “run for a rep”? Why would anybody in his or her right mind want to run for a rep of that kind? Yet I meet with that kind of locution in all of Kenya’s newspapers nearly every day.

It was prominent on page 5 of the Daily Nation of May 31. Precisely what does it mean to “run for woman rep”? Does it mean to run on behalf of a “woman rep”? Or do you mean to outrun even Kipchoge Keino in your chase after an exemplary women’s rep called Rachel Shebesh, a female politician whose words rush out of the mouth more rapidly than Niagara Falls – words, however, which, on that very account, mean exactly nothing?

MORAL FIBRE

Yet I can report that I am acquainted with very many Kenyan women with intelligence, education, experience and moral fibre to represent you much more effectively than you are now represented by men both in the house alleged to be “august” and in any other congregation of policymakers and policy implementers.

That is the question that increasingly poses itself in Kenya and throughout the human World. Why is Kenya’s Parliament almost completely devoid of women and men of such a mental and ethical calibre? Why have we failed to devise a political election system that ensures a certain level and quality of ethical consciousness, intellectual sharpness and sociohistorical knowledge as the criteria of political representation?

One probable answer to that question is that such women (and such men) never stand to be elected into such forums. The question is: why not? Most probably because they dread the thought that, in our legislative houses, their voices will drown in a plethora of words from the individualist and ethnic self-seeking that characterise Kenya’s entire “educated” elite.

The question is: Why have we allowed our society to come to such a pass? Even in a country like ours, where the individual’s quest for monetary filth rules the mind as tyrannically as Der Fuehrer once ruled the minds of the German spiessbuerger, many intelligent human beings – women as well as men – deliberately avoid forums characterised by what Peter Cheyney, a popular storyteller in London’s street English, often dismisses as “sweet Fanny Adams”.