Let's lift politics out of the mud

Nairobi Gubernatorial aspirant Esther Passaris and Miguna Miguna at the JKL talk show

I am a woman and I have a pocketful of cards. There is always a card in play.

It might be the humanity card, which tends to engage without notice when a friend or a family member needs help.

Or when a child sticks a sponsorship form in your face as you’re dashing out of the supermarket – you try to run but just when you’re about to make a clean getaway a sharp tug on your heart strings yanks you back, and you find yourself making a donation without even knowing the cause.

It might be the parenthood card, one that is always on the table, and which will usually trump all others.

When the house help calls - for whatever reason - even before you pick up the phone your parenthood card is at the ready should you need to drop everything to attend to your child.

It might be the professional card, a card that is flashed by female employees around the world when they put their career hats on and become bona fide members of the productive classes.

Women who wake up every morning to build the nation for the betterment of their children and their children’s children.

It might be the entrepreneurship card, played every single day by women in business. Women who jostle in the teeming crowd of hopefuls who want to make it big in the business world, hustling hard to make a success of enterprise.

It might be the politics card, which women toss on the table when they engage in politics at every level. Whether we like it or not, as citizens – both male and female – we are political creatures.

Politics is not just about governments and power, but about ideology, morality and ethics. It is the total complex of relations between people living in society and as women, we must learn to appreciate that many of our interactions have political impact.

How we engage at the grassroots level, the way in which we influence community relations, will eventually show up in the character of our leaders.

So when a male politician uses a female politician’s sexual history as the point of reference for all her other achievements, then we are all getting our politics wrong.

When he feels empowered to play the ‘rape card’, by speaking about sexual violence like it is the norm, rather than the exception, we have a problem.

But perhaps the bigger problem is how some men react when women are under threat. When Miguna Miguna launched a gender-based attack on Esther Passaris, right-thinking Kenyans were outraged.

But it didn’t take long before the women who expressed their displeasure were accused of playing the ‘woman card’.

We were admonished to be objective and to treat Ms Passaris as a politician first and as a woman second. That there was no basis to the argument that she was attacked because of her sex.

That if it was too hot, she would rather get out of the kitchen because politics is a dirty game and those who play it must do so in the mud. On the face of it, all these things are true.

Indeed, women in politics are leaders first and foremost, and leadership should not be qualified on the basis of sex or gender.

That said, female leaders are frequently forced to answer to queries that relate to their sexual choices rather than their ability to lead.

The yardstick that they are measured against begins at the waist and goes on a downward trajectory rather than at the neck heading upwards.

For a male politician, sexual exploits are an accomplishment, for a woman any sex at all is evidence that her moral compass is broken and she is unable to lead.

The irony is that were it not for the intimate union between a man and a woman, none of us would be here to argue about it.

And yet we persist in propagating a social construct that puts women on a moralistic pedestal, demanding of them the same virtues that were projected upon Mary the Mother of Jesus, and then dancing on their graves when they fall from grace.

Sex is a dirty word for a woman in politics, even dirtier than the game itself and yet we volunteer ourselves to join the fray every election cycle, well aware that for much of the time it will be less about governance and more about biology.

It is offensive for a man to allege that women are playing the ‘woman card’ when they call out leaders who use gender as a weapon.

Like I say, I am a woman and I have a pocketful of cards. We all do and we play them with precision.

We don’t need to toss the woman card into the ring because it is the embodiment of who we are, and we are against the ropes everyday fighting to be seen as human beings first and all else second.

What we must all do is lift our politics out of the mud where slinging sexual slurs is not only expected but accepted.