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KENYA - NEW LAWS IGNORED - WOMEN'S BARRIERS IN 2013 ELECTION

 

http://www.trust.org/item/20131206123031-t8x2y/

 

More on: Women's rights

A woman waits outside a tallying centre with a Kenyan police officer guarding the gate at Mathare slum in Nairobi March 6, 2013, following the elections. REUTERS /Karel Prinsloo

Katy Migiro - December 6, 2013

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Roza Buyu has run for parliament twice in Kenya’s western city of Kisumu. Both times she lost.

She spoke about how negative propaganda has sabotaged her campaigns at the launch of a report about women’s participation in the March 2013 elections. Female candidates in Kenya face many barriers, including violence, cultural and social stereotypes, lack of money and lack of political connections.

“In 2007, I had gone through a lot of violence and I had learned from that. I promised myself, if it means a goat has to die every day to feed the security men who are going to protect me, I was going to do it.

I did it for one month, killed a goat every day to feed the men who were acting as my security, and paid each of them for 30 days.

But what I didn’t realise was [I had] to sharpen my propaganda machinery. Propaganda was just rife.

‘This woman, this is her fourth husband [they said]. Her three husbands died. This one has inherited her [a Luo custom where a widow is ‘inherited’ by her late husband’s brother who will provide for her]. So she is really not married in this place. She is really not one of us. She doesn’t come from here.’

Propaganda hit me like crazy. And the problem with that is you waste so much money trying to bring down this propaganda at the expense of selling your agenda. You sound like an apologist. You don’t sound like a leader. I even had to carry my husband [along to rallies].

As you fight the rumours, the man [politician] is actually going around selling his policy. You look like you are just a woman with nothing to offer whereas the man is talking about issues.

Politics is very difficult for women. There is one fundamental thing that stops women from realising their full potential – most of our political parties are male dominated.

When a woman gets into the political party and tries to push like a man, so that she can gain her position within that political party, it raises a lot of suspicion. She is always perceived to be looking for men [sexually] within that political party.

She will stop herself from pushing forward because she has her reputation to protect and she doesn’t want to be hit too hard.

In 2013, I got the ODM (Orange Democratic Party) nomination. It is expected that when you get a nomination from the ODM party [in its stronghold of Kisumu] that you are an automatic winner in the general election.

But I did not win, simply because of patriarchy and the coalition politics. When I got the certificate of ODM, my main rival – who is currently the MP of Kisumu West constituency – went into FORD Kenya, which was a coalition partner.

He was campaigning using the colour orange [ODM’s colour] because we are predominantly an ODM region. People were actually confused. They didn’t know who the ODM candidate is. People thought he’s still in ODM.

The electoral code of conduct is so clear. It offers guidelines and it recognises and identifies all the offences.

But each time you went to the IEBC [Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission] official, even when you carried the orange caps that FORD Kenya – whose main colour is green – was using to confuse voters, they didn’t do anything.

If you even took them to the site to show them my billboard has been destroyed, they just don’t do anything.

A lot of unfairness against women goes on because officials do not care.”

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http://www.trust.org/item/20131205145820-u5bql/?source=hpeditorial&siteVersion=mobile

Katy Migiro - December 5, 2013

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – New laws designed to increase the number of elected women in Kenyan politics had no effect on the 2013 elections because those concerned failed to implement them, the Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) said.

“We have good laws that we are not using,” said Mariam Kamunyu, the lead author of ‘Key Gains and Challenges: A Gender Audit of Kenya’s 2013 Election Process’, a report on how women fared in the polls,

The March 2013 elections were the first to be held under Kenya’s 2010 constitution, which outlawed discrimination, promoted equality and created  reserved seats for women. This raised hopes that more women would enter parliament and take new positions in the Senate and county governments.

The results disappointed backers of the new constitution. In the national assembly, women won just six percent of directly elected constituency seats, down from eight percent in 2007. Not a single woman was elected to the powerful position of governor or senator for the 47 newly created counties.

Kamunyu, presenting the report on Wednesday, accused virtually all the bodies involved of failing to uphold women’s rights - the electoral commission, the political parties, the police and the registrar for political parties.

At the launch of the election campaign, women candidates said their supporters were beaten, they were slandered and their billboards were defaced, without redress.

“Most duty bearers did not fully utilise their authority, their discretion and the constitutional backing that they had to significantly expand the space for women’s participation,” said Kamunyu.

“Politics is very difficult for women,” said Roza Buyu, who has stood for parliament twice without success. “A lot of unfairness against women goes on because officials do not care.”

VIOLENCE, STEREOTYPES, LACK OF MONEY

Female parliamentary candidates in Kenya face many barriers, such as violence, cultural and social stereotypes, lack of money and lack of political connections.

Before 2013, Kenyan women had the lowest level of parliamentary representation in the region. Less than 10 percent of Kenyan MPs were female, compared with at least 30 percent in all its east African neighbours. Rwanda leads the world with women holding 56 percent of its parliamentary seats.

The Kenyan report said the 2013 election resulted in women holding 19 percent of the seats in the national assembly and hailed this as a “historic and impressive improvement in women’s representation.” But this was due largely to the addition of reserved seats for women, not success at the ballot box.

At the local level, women won five percent of the 1,450 ward representative positions, 82 seats, while 680 were nominated to seats.

The report said the women’s performance was dismal largely because few women actually stood. Between 93 and 97 percent of candidates for the various positions were male. 

“The women who actually ran, they actually performed just as well as the men. It’s only that getting to the race is made so difficult,” Kamunyu said.

The success rate among women who tried to become MPs was 12 percent, compared to 14 percent for men. The sexes were equally likely to win a seat as a member of a county assembly, with a success rate for each of 15 percent.

“If the electoral environment had been fair and more women had made it to the ballot papers, they could have been as successful as male candidates,” Kamunyu said.  “Change could occur if more women pursued elective positions.”

BASTIONS OF PATRIARCHY

One of the main hurdles for women was getting nominated by political parties.

“The party is one of the biggest challenges to women acquiring political leadership,” said Alice Wahome, elected as an MP this year after losing in 2002 and 2007.

“This time I was able to infiltrate into the party management… so I knew the network properly that was going to be used to come up with nominations.”

Women called for party democracy to be strengthened so that the nomination process was fairer and more transparent.

The 2011 Political Parties Act says that not more than two-thirds of a party’s membership or governing body must be of the same gender.

FIDA said that parties had falsified their membership lists to inflate the number of female members and only appointed women to peripheral positions on their national executive councils.

“Political parties retained their traditional role, serving as bastions of patriarchy and subjugation of women,” the report said.

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