Women and youths of Western Kenya are dormant in politics

The main political parties in Kenya have now re-organized themselves for electoral competition to garner different political positions come next year. This is so given that next year will be a year of change in political leaderships in Kenya through a general election. Candidates and flag-bearers for different parties and different regions as well as communities have been identified. The two main political parties are already in a shape for a fierce race in competition for state house. They have already identified presidential candidates and respective running mates. Unfortunately, they are all men. No woman is going to participate in the election as a presidential candidate or as a running mate to the presidential candidate. Reasons are obvious; a persistent culture of strongly entrenched social patriarchy.

More worse is the western region of Kenya. It is the region where women and the youths are most excluded from socializing in the mainstream politics. Sad enough, it is the most populated; it is estimated to be the home of twelve million people out of the total population of forty million Kenyans. It means that fifty percent of the registered voters come from this region, and out of this the youths and women make three quarters of the registered voters.

The current position is that this region has made politics and governance to be the reserve of old rich men from specific families; a patriarchal aristocracy of some kind thriving on social injustice to the humble. This is palpable when one looks at a fact that the current political leaders have been there for the past three decades and above. Most of them come from families that collaborated with colonial governments, or come from the families that served in the government of Jomo Kenyatta as well as serving the tyrannical dictatorship of Daniel Moi. The regimes of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi supported social patriarchy and hence planted the spirit of marginalizing women and the youths. This is very evident in the current political groupings that are in the region, they are dominantly a group of rich old men with a focus on making money from politics, not using political power to fine-tune Kenya’s governance towards inclusivity and sustainability.

Western Kenya is among the poor regions of Kenya, women and the youth being the most affected by poverty. Not because they are lazy, but because of the monster in the name of social patriarchy. Old men are the owners of land, animals, commercial buildings and any system of economic production. The youths and women are only spectators or servants that are never paid. It is this social patriarchy that has made women in this region to compromise into polygamous marriages as second or third wives, or to be socially shaken out into urban areas as commercial sex workers, small hotel waiters, house-maids, road-side roasted maize sellers, illicit brew sellers, small grocery owners or freelance garment washers. For instance, they are these rich old men from the region that determine who is to get a certain job or wins a certain tender. Obviously, these have economically excluded young men and women from unknown families. As a result, most of the youths from western Kenya have had no option but to go to the city either to Kampala or Nairobi to work as night guards, motor-bicycle riders, stone mason assistants, garden keepers or unskilled wall painters. These youths are so much unfortunate to the extent of being estranged from land, the land which is kept unused by their fathers at the village.

Kenya subscribes to millennial development goals, its strategic plan vision 2030 as well as the new constitution are in fact in one way or acting as replica of the millennial development goals. They promise or pledge to support sovereignty of the people, gender inclusivity and mainstreaming of women and the youth into significant social, political as well as economic processes. Why the political leaders have left these pledges to remain a dead literature on the pages of the constitution is not known. Or maybe it is time to accept the social reality that oppressors cannot willfully or voluntarily give freedom to their victims, unless the oppressed fight for the freedom. If this is true, of which I believe it is technically true, then the youths and women of western Kenya have to unite and fight the oppressive social patriarchy, they have nothing to lose other than chains of poverty.