To make a difference, women mustn’t fear vying for top posts

The small news item was tucked away in some obscure page of this newspaper. I can’t vouch for its veracity, but apparently, the women of Vihiga County do not want to leave anyone in doubt as to their political aspirations: 151 of them want to stand for elections next year, which, if true, should be a record of sorts. If a sizeable number do convince voters to elect them, then Vihiga will never again be a county for old men.

Why is that noteworthy? In the first instance, although the majority, predictably, want to run as MCAs, one of them is ambitious enough to want to become governor. In 2013, to my knowledge, no woman aspired for this exalted position, and only a few were picked as running mates, presumably for the purpose of gender balance. They became deputy governors.

The ones who come readily to mind are Mombasa’s Hazel Katana, Kisumu’s Ruth Odinga, Mary Kibuka of Taita- Taveta and Adelina Mwau of Makueni. The others include Embu’s Dorothy Nditi, Kericho’s Susan Kikwai, Evalyne Aruasa of Narok, and Penninah Malonza of Kitui.

If there are a few more, I beg their forbearance, for they do not seem to have made much impact on the national stage, probably because they have never publicly accused their bosses of sidelining them. An American Vice-President once famously described his job as being not worth a bucket of warm spit, and it appears the job of deputy governor in Kenya is worth even less.

And then, in our overtly patriarchal society, women are still regarded as incapable of offering strong leadership, which is, and always has been, arrant nonsense. Parochialism comes in many guises, and too many Kenyan politicians have perfected the art of putting down female aspirants without appearing to do so lest they turn off too many potential voters.

Is it any wonder that a number of women deputy governors are making their bosses lose sleep because they want to wrest away the feeding trough? I am no feminist, but I have absolutely no time for the male megalomaniacs, who still believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen, far away from governors’ mansions. I also don’t believe that women should shun politics just because they fear being targeted by male chauvinists through insults and sexual innuendo.

The result is that women prefer to play safe – vie for those seats that are not coveted by men. Their best bet is to run as women representatives in Parliament and MCAs. Male politicians don’t want the two-thirds rule; they prefer a situation where they can placate women through condescending tokenism.

We Kenyans have done a very poor job of accommodating women in politics, in the board-room, and even in institutions of higher learning. Our neighbours Uganda, Rwanda and even Tanzania are way ahead of us because they made it a policy to assign a specific quota for women leaders, mainly because they realised that members of the fair sex are not mere flower girls – they bring a perspective to leadership that men cannot.

Liberia elected and re-elected a woman as President. Tanzania has a female Vice-President. Uganda has a female Speaker of the National Assembly. Even Zimbabwe had a female Vice-President. Apparently, nobody in this country has ever contemplated appointing a woman to such a high office. Why not?

This is probably because, for some unfathomable reasons, women do not have a “constituency” of their own. It has been noted that they do not vote for fellow women. I cannot pretend to explain this anomaly, but even in established democracies like the US, a presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton, someone with proven credentials in public life, is struggling to win women’s votes.

Let us put it this way: unless women go out of their way to vie for important political offices the way the Vihiga lot want to do, real power will be out of their reach for the foreseeable future. Berating men for shutting them out will never be the answer.

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Now that the teachers’ unions have ruled out a strike for the next four years, Kenyans, in general, should be happy. Those things can ruin a country’s reputation. The outcome is a clear indication that given a chance, dialogue can do wonders. But can we afford to take the seemingly strike-happy Wilson Sossion at his word?

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