Our Gender Bill Is Ill-conceived
By Donald Kipkorir via FB
Our politicians know that majority of Kenyans get excited with meaningless tokenism like the Duale-sponsored Gender Bill to reserve upto 1/3 parliamentary seats for women. This Billl, like the Constitutional clause it is based on is the most useless political maneuver that doesn’t increase our GDP or gender mainstreaming.
The most successful countries in gender mainstreaming like Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark have succeeded without political tokenism. What they have done is passing legislation to remove all gender bias in education and employment.
What these legal intervention in education and employment do in the long run, is create an enabling environment for women to compete with men in politics. In Kenya, women are still left behind in education, employment and corporate world.
The Gender Bill in Kenya will only increase the number of employment opportunities in Parliament for the girlfriends and mistresses of powerful Kenyan men. These are women who will not speak in parliament. If these seats were so important, how come most of the current women representatives have decided to go run for real elective offices against men?
The only countries obsessed with Gender Bills in politics like Kenya are Afghanistan, Albania, Uganda and El Salvador! Not the most enviable group to be part of. No developed country does this. Why do we keep re-inventing useless wheels?
