Acknowledge our women’s suitability for leadership

Four events, three in diverse continents and one in the cyber-world defined gender issues for me this week. Two of them were positive and two negative. First the negative. In our dear Motherland, MPs unashamedly voted to kill any possibility of implementing the not more than two thirds gender constitutional requirement for Parliament. In the absence of any amendment to resolve this issue before the next elections, we face the real possibility of a constitutional crisis if we do not elect enough women to Parliament in 2017.

To be honest, anyone who watches Kenya’s Parliament closely could predict how the vote would go; the animus against “these women” is fairly loud in the corridors of the august House. One MP told me he only voted ‘Yes’ when he realised there were not enough numbers for the Bill to pass! In a country where women issues, including those as basic as funding for sanitary pads for school girls is back-burnered, we will continue to pay a heavy price for marginalising half of our population in leadership.