Women leaders are key to ‘the Kenya we want’

One of the arguments given by feminists in response to an overwhelming and slightly misguided developmental push for involving men in women’s rights projects has been that this has to be treated with caution. Caution, because we do not want a situation where men come to tell women what their rights are, and how they need to fight for them and to ‘stop being their own enemies’.

Any person gendered and performing as a woman knows the odds against her and is actively engaging her agency in response to this. However, if ‘male involvement’ – as it is popularly known – means ‘enlightened’ men engaging fellow men in stopping impunity, grand corruption and the lack of accountability that inadvertently leads to the abuse of a large majority of citizens in African countries (women), then we certainly have no problem with that.

Where am I going with this? Kenyans are currently being treated to what has been dubbed as a ‘national conference’ to discuss ‘the Kenya we want’. It is a government-led agenda, with the office of the Prime Minister Raila Odinga as its flag bearer. The conference was advertised as bringing together dignitaries, former African leaders and government officials, while wananchi were urged to give their views via the media. This is the same media that the government seeks to control with the current bill as it is. Indeed, watching the opening ceremony yesterday (4 February), one was at pains to see internally displaced persons (IDPs) still languishing in the camps represented or the teacher whose 3,000 salary increase is very slowly forthcoming. Where were they to frame ‘the Kenya we want’?

Instead what we saw were politicians, diplomatic corps, a smattering of civil society actors whom they could probably not avoid inviting, and the business sector. All the right noises were made with regard to this ‘not being another conference’ and that Kenyans should work as one. I am certain the sarcasm is not lost on the reader because we do not need politicians to tell us what is wrong with this country.

While the prime minister was making his proclamations with regard to not to tolerating bad apples in the basket, Kenyans were queuing for fuel in petrol stations due to another grand corruption scheme called Triton and emerging cartels within the energy sector. So if this government is so responsive to Kenyans and so desperately wants to listen to them, why hasn’t the Ministry Of Energy come forth to tell Kenyans – who have indicated that the Kenya they want is one with fuel – when the crisis will end and how such disappearances of fuel will be prevented once and for all.

Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka made loud noises to much applause on the need for President Mwai Kibaki to stop the national bus on a kerb and deal with the pickpockets within it. Meanwhile a forlorn minister for agriculture, William Ruto, faced a tirade of accusations regarding companies that he owns and other related companies which were given licenses to trade maize subsequently exported to south Sudan, while Kenyans are starving and reduced to boiling raw fruit in order to survive.

Has the bus not run out of fuel, or are the lights in the bus switched off? Because if Kalonzo’s statement is to be taken to heart, the suspects are all known. Kenyans have indicated the Kenya they want since last year – a Kenya with affordable and accessible food!

President Kibaki laughed and in his typical style told Kenyans not to worry because there were rogues in every country, and that they should not give up. One wonders how the hundreds of Kenyans who were burnt and injured within the space of one week at a supermarket fire and subsequently at an oil tanker explosion should take heart first at the lack of efficient and enforced safety regulations in public spaces, and second the poverty that drives people to a clearly dangerous site (an oil spill) to draw free fuel in order to sell it for survival. Take heart? Is this the Kenya we want?

This morning (5 February ) as I watched German ambassador on television give a speech on the opening panel, I recognised that this was one of the few ambassadors who provided a clear and unequivocal position on the flawed elections in December of 2007. However is the destiny of this country being informed by foreign dignitaries?

All the government needed to do was gather news items from all the television stations in the last week and it would have been able to discern the Kenya Kenyans want, without a conference. But wait, the very government that is so keen on listening to its people has gagged the media. Is this public therapy for the political class necessary in a country that sits in such a precarious political situation?

As Kenyan politicians ride on the coattails of President Obama’s ‘Yes we can’ motto, one wonders why the three men at the helm of Kenya’s leadership are not in parliament plugging the holes in the bill that will ensure that the Special Tribunal is actually set up and deals effectively with those who were responsible for organising, financing and motivating for organised post-election violence, in addition to those who took advantage of the circumstances and wreaked havoc on women’s bodies. Why are they not straightening out dubious ministers who argue that the value of having a local tribunal – using the usual rhetoric of local solutions to local problems – is because we cannot, and I quote, ‘control the foreign commissioners while at The Hague (International Criminal Court)’?

A government that is so keen on listening to its citizens blatantly ignored their voices when the cabinet secured ministerial positions for those adversely mentioned in the now famous Waki report. The Kenya we want is one that ensures state accountability; will this conference drive that point home?

The Kenya we want? Surely we know that already? We also know the Kenya we don’t want and the current political dispensation is doing a good job of handing that out in good measure. One of the things that Kenyans are good at doing is laughing at themselves. We already have a slew of jokes regarding names that are likely to be heard within the next couple of years: Media Ban Okello, Post-Election Violence Kamau, Teargas Makokha, Mediation Talks Jomvu, Skirmishes Kilimo – the list goes on. Nonetheless, what the political class is failing to see is that Kenyans are no longer laughing with them. One of the advantages of this coalition government has been to show Kenyans the blatant abuse of power that any leader, irrespective of their ethnic orientation, is bound to give in to. The prime minister, once viewed as a maverick leader and supposed ‘leader of the Luo’, has lost the plot. He has lost ground within the very constituency that he is said to have held in the palm of his hands, and this is not only among the middle-class. I doubt that we still consider President Kibaki to still have the plot. I believe he lost the handle on that one in 2003.

While we contemplate the leadership possibilities for this country – for this is really where the focus must be with the 2012 general elections looming large – we must organise. First Lady Lucy Kibaki remarked – in one of her few lucid moments – on the failure of the male internal security minister to avert the seemingly non-stop disasters in the country, arguing that a woman leader would have done a better job. As feminists then, we must organise now, strategise early and claim these political structures with fervour. Through feminist analysis we, as women, know what is wrong and must act now.

As we ‘watch’ the never-ending crisis in Zimbabwe and the unfortunate but real potential of the Jacob Zuma presidency in South Africa, we must mobilise, for history will not judge us kindly if we do not.

* Awino Okech is a Kenyan feminist researcher and activist.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.