are we nearly there yet, ladies?

By Lucy Oriang' (allafrica.com)

April 7, 2006: "Women know not only that they can compete, but also that they can excel.... They know that we don't have to be stuck in the backyard." - Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

In the April 3 edition of Newsweek, Joshua Hammer writes one of the best pieces I've read on women and leadership. Titled "Healing Powers", it focuses on a handful of women who have made a dramatic difference in the way Africa works - what he calls a women's revolution.

Hammer strikes just the right balance in telling the story of these women. He celebrates the accomplishments of the emerging elite corps of women leaders on the continent - whose work ranges from taking the helm in a country broken down by decades of civil war, to fighting corruption barons in Nigeria to healing the wounds of the body and soul in Rwanda.

He also acknowledges the struggles of the myriad African women who still have to contend with violence and lack of the political power and laws to change the course of their lives.

I like this article for one thing: Hammer does not gloss over the challenges that we face in the race to the top. Ours is a handicap event in which we are often fighting an established hierarchy that has little interest in change.

If you want to get anywhere, take the cue from the woman most feted in Africa today. It has not always been so. Johnson-Sirleaf has known more than her fair share of hardship.

In the struggle for Liberia, she has had to lay her life on the line. She narrowly escaped execution twice - and a rape attempt - and spent six months in prison during the mad regime of Samuel Doe, in which she was once the Finance minister.

Yet she can rightly be rated as one of Africa's lucky few. In the freedom struggles of this continent, there have been many foot soldiers - even generals - whose names never made it into the annals of history.

There are also millions others who make do with what life throws at them, feeling the desperation but never experiencing the flash of inspiration that spurs us to settle for nothing but the best.

Whatever we Kenyan women do, it will come to nothing if we don't take the time to define and find that spark that makes the difference.

Only then will we be able to sleep easy, knowing that our daughters are safe wherever they are. Believe me, for every woman and girl who finds her way to the Nairobi Women's Hospital, there are thousands others who lick their wounds in silence.

The law is not sufficiently primed to protect them. The health-care system is not designed to deal with such an onslaught. At any rate, our customs and traditions are constructed in such a way that it is always the woman to blame when these things happen.

Yet there are thousands of women in Kenya today who are busy battling the Sexual Offences Bill sponsored by Nominated MP Njoki Ndung'u.

These self-righteous souls are obsessed with what they call international conventions supporting the rights of prostitutes and homosexuals that are supposedly being sneaked into Kenyan legislation.

So concerned about so-called declining morals are they that they fail to look beyond their noses and see the horrendous injuries and suffering of little girls still in diapers who have been torn apart by rapists. What on earth could be more immoral than letting child defilers and sex pests get away with it?

It is not for want of trying that women have never been able to make big political noise in this country. We have the skills, knowledge, experience and the right. Yet, as recently as this week, we were still celebrating small gains that we should have taken for granted at independence.

Don't get me wrong. It is truly remarkable that women have made such breakthroughs in public service. I say so because that is one area of our lives that is well and truly hidebound in tradition. There is a pecking order, from what I recall of my days there, and you just have to wait in the queue.

I remember a chief-turned-MP, now dead, raising an uproar in Parliament with the story that when he was an assistant chief, he used to pray day and night that his boss would die because it was the only way he would get the top job.

That is what makes the successes of these women commendable. Yet it is only half the story. There are layers of leadership that women must cut through if they are to make that critical difference.

The only power that's worth fighting for in Africa is political. And it is where we are stuck in a rut. On the Government side, we have two Cabinet ministers and five assistants. If you think that's appalling, take a quick glance at the opposition: Kanu has some three women MPs and the Liberal Democratic Party one.