Why women ought to emulate Shollei

If there is one woman I have come to respect, it is Gladys Boss Shollei. Whichever way the outcome of her saga goes, she will have left a strong legacy for women to emulate going forward; which is that we must all develop a strong backbone and fight for our reputations to the best of our abilities.

 Right from the moment that Chief Justice Willy Mutunga and members of the Judicial Service Commission threw their first salvo against her that generally painted her, at least in the public eye, as a corrupt individual who was not averse to using her high level position to manipulate deals to go her way,

 Gladys came out guns blazing. Her beef? That these top-level judicial officers were attempting to destroy her professional reputation that she had worked so hard for decades to build and maintain. There are people who argued that the way she was going about this was all wrong. In their opinion, these strong-willed males were too powerful to shake down, hence her best option was to cooperate with them, step aside and allow investigations to commence which would, in the end, clear her name if she was truly innocent.

 But Gladys is clearly not made of such soft tissue. And I understand where she is coming from because, if you have spent all your adult life working hard to achieve and realise your dreams, and particularly for a woman who has had to fight hard and strong against the male dominated tide in order to make it to the top of the game, you will not allow anyone to come and mess it up. For that reason only, I have pulled my hat off for Gladys and we want her to keep fighting, no matter what comes out from the woodwork.

 Until proven guilty, every suspect has the God-given and legally sanctioned right to defend themselves to the best of their ability (and financial strength). Naturally, many of us tend to shy away from controversy and when it hits, we dash into the nearest cave and hide away from society until the storm blows over.

Some of us are so badly scared of what society thinks of us that any negative taint is bound to drive us into suicidal tendencies at worst. Others opt to hibernate away from society for the rest of their lives.

 But Gladys is continuously teaching us that it does not have to be that way. It is the reason why people go to court demanding truckloads of financial compensation for ‘defamation’, which demonstrates the high value we place on how people perceive us.

 Traditionally, men believed and enforced the belief that women were the custodians of their reputation. Thus, if a woman’s reputation was besmirched, it followed that her man’s reputation (father, brother, uncle, husband, grandfather, et al) and that of his family was dishonoured. Such a woman would then be put to death in the most painful way possible (burning, acid attack, killing, burying alive, stoning and even mutilating) for the crime of ‘shaming’ and ‘humiliating’ her man and family at large.

 At some level, individual reputations still cloud that of families. A family is scorned when any of its members, be it a man or woman, is said to be a criminal, which is not such a good tag to hang around anybody.

The reverse is also true. Families are commended for bringing forth champions, leaders and role models and bright aura surrounds them for life.

So keep going, Madam Shollei. Fight for your name and reputation. Whatever the outcome, at least you will carry on with the confidence of the knowledge that you did all you could to protect your professional dignity.