Kenyan women hits and misses on rights

President Uhuru Kenyatta is in Canada attending the #WomenDeliver conference. He is expected to discuss global challenges to gender equality as well as the wellbeing of girls in the 21st Century. I’m sure the president will spin a good yarn about Kenya being the most progressive country on the planet when it comes to women’s rights, and no doubt many people will believe him. He talks a good talk, our president. If you leave your spin filter at home, you’re likely to be unduly impressed by the state of our nation.

So, if Canada is listening, please remind Mr Kenyatta that his National Assembly is in breach of Kenya’s Constitution; having failed to observe the Two-thirds Gender Principle. That women are being killed by men at an alarming rate and that despite appending his signature to a law that promises free sanitary towels for girls in need, there are still millions of Kenyan girls who miss school for days every month because they cannot afford feminine hygiene products. And, oh yes, that one of his governors has made it a sport to weaponise femininity by shaming women leaders in public. 

This is not to say we haven’t come a long way since the days when women wearing trousers was an abomination, and women thought they could only become housewives, secretaries, or customer-care representatives. The women’s movement has grown in leaps and bounds.

Women are represented at some of the highest echelons of governance. There they have room to either govern well or to be mediocre, money-hungry parasites just like many of their male colleagues have been for decades. 

 Gross inequality

It is not by accident that women have been at the centre of some of Kenya’s most notorious corruption heists. Many of them have had no apologies to make. That, my friends, is the equal opportunity of it all. Unfortunately, equality of the sexes in the Kenyan context is qualified by the gross inequality between the elite and the working classes. Monied women with status have more opportunity to enrich themselves unfairly than the ordinary woman on the street.

Beyond politics, women leaders can also be found in the church where they also exercise a great deal of autonomy over their personal choices, aided in no small way by the harvests they gather from the fields of their followers. Women of the cloth – particularly those in the modern-day evangelical church -exert much more influence than those in the congregation.

Even in the church, it is money and clout that separates the wheat from the chaff.  Pastors have become rich because they sell hope, and hope is the most potent drug in the world. When things are bad, it just takes a sliver of hope to get you hooked on possibility. When things are good, you want them to stay that way forever, so you stack hope on top of hope; praying that your feet will only land on glory after glory. Either way, you will buy what your pastor is selling, whether it’s with a shilling or a billion shillings.

After glory

Many pastors are peddling their charisma under the guise of divinity. They talk a good talk because they understand that their words have power. They know full well that their tongues can get them out of anything. That’s why a flashy pastor recovered from the ridicule after she prophesied that God would bless her church ‘daughters’ with new cars before the end of the year. Christmas came and went with no automobiles in sight (unless you counted her own).

And that’s why a city preacher stood confidently in front of his congregation talking schmuck with a face so straight it could have been a ruler. For me, the depth of contempt in his tone was far worse than the ‘matusi ya matuta na matambaa’. Worse still, he fully expected them to sit there and take it. Which they did, even when he admitted what many snake oil pastors believe in their heart of hearts but would never say out loud – that he was the god of his ministry, and his followers were going to put some respect on his name whether they liked it or not. Can you blame him?

He is a man accused of darkest sins imaginable and yet he still has a captive audience.  This is the reality of our world. We are battered to the point of death by the State and then left in the sanctuary for the church vulture to extract every last bit of our flesh while promising that there is hope in heaven. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.

Ms Masiga is Peace and Security editor, The Conversation Africa