OPINION: Women empowerment is a big joke

If you take a brisk walk into the distant past, you will meet your great-grandfather obliviously enjoying the setting sun outside a newly built hut. It is crisp. In mint condition.

It belongs to his third wife, or fourth, or fifth. Does it matter? Absolutely not. He has on a leopard skin, covering just his loins. Children play around naked, as the older boys drive the animals in their respective shades. The day is breaking.

During those days, there was order and everybody had their distinct roles. The women bore children and reared them; the men protected and provided food for the family. The children, on the other hand, concentrated on being children, until they came out of age, where the boys got circumcised and became men, and the girls got married off.

Occasionally, sacrifices would be offered to appease the gods when a villager commits a serious offense. Other than that, nobody lacked anything.

Then the white man comes, inspired by the conquests of Alexander the Great back in time. He declares that Africa and Africans are indeed backward. The industrial revolution had depleted their resources and they were out and about shopping for them. They took lands which were available in abundance, owned them and later sold them to Africans. Isn’t that one big cruel joke?

As they grabbed lands, they preached of a new god, who was more powerful than the rest; a god that towered above the African gods who had guided and protected Africans through bouts of diseases.

Generations and generations came through various calamities, scathed but undeterred because the gods wouldn’t let them. But this was the hallmark of primitivity as if Africa and Africans just came into being.

Schools came up to teach Africans new ways of life, and make them like the whites so that they could homogenize the world and create a market for their goods in the long run.

Like darkness gradually disappears with dawn, and eventual rising of the sun, Africans abandoned their gods, their ways of life and adopted the new one, that would see them fight and gain independence.

The white man realizes that he made a mistake in bringing education to Africa. It would be nice if they just remained primitive. Then they brought AIDS to make Africa close to permanently subservient to the west.

When we fight, they turn a blind eye, take out oil if there’s any or just leave us fighting to our ends as with Somalia. They don’t need charcoal, which apparently is the leading export of Somalia.

Because of the dwindling resources, and white man’s knowledge, things got tilted. Women began demanding more and more things. They were no longer content staying in the kitchen and ruling it.

Just like Alexander the Great, they were also keen on expanding their territories. And so they began using fancy terms such as ‘equality’ and ‘empowerment,’ aided by another term ‘marginalized groups.’

Men deliberated and came up with an insightful conclusion which was ‘why not?’ FGM came tumbling down, although not completely. Women now wear suits and high heels, to attend meetings in Geneva and New York, where they discuss at length the effects of FGM, whereby they are given some funds by donors.

As a matter of principle, these women come to purchase houses in high-end neighborhoods and roll out in luxury SUVs, while some girls still get mutilated in Marsabit and Pokot.

More and more women are breaking the proverbial glass ceiling. Even with this kind of empowerment, women are still stuck with the traditional role of the man, that he is the sole provider.

He pays the rent, educates the kids, and pays the house help even if he earns less than the wife (in case she chooses to remain a wife). When calamity strikes, as it sometimes does, and the man loses his job or is struck by a disease, the next thing you hear is the woman complaining about how he has suddenly become a burden just a month into the situation.

The man, mind you, has been footing bills unflinchingly for the last decade, but then one month it becomes burdensome. She wants out. She reaches the media, just in case a couple of anonymous people will support her decision.

A month later she is out leaving us with the question: what’s the need of women empowerment if they can’t raise a man to his feet when defeat is on repeat?

Enter the constitution. A two-thirds gender majority. It is not achievable in polls, so they create an extra seat for the women, just for women to compete against each other just in case we end up with a man.

The crafters of the constitution did not think this through. They were obsessed with gender rule, not knowing that the common voter doesn’t have a clue what that means.

For that, we may have to pay by nominating a whopping close to fifty women to the house, just to attain the constitutional threshold.

As far as I am concerned, the women want to remain marginalized forever, where they will speak forever about empowerment and equality, and in the process earn a few free seats to parliament, and of course not take any share of responsibility whatsoever in a union.