Oral East AfricaViceVersa Global tweeted a photo captioned Kenya police deployed an all-female squad at the protest in support of the “End Femicide March” on January 27.
This was a positive and thoughtful gimmick by Kenya’s National police force that comprises of 93,214 men and just 16,643 women.
Women make up only 15 percent of Kenya’s police force despite a constitutional mandate a balance with neither gender being over two-thirds in any government body.
This showed glaringly outside the capital like in Kisumu where I covered the #TotalShutdown protest against femicide, the gimmick of having enough police women to escort the march could not be replicated.
Over 10,000 women and some men took to the streets in Nairobi, Turkana. Kisumu, Mom-basa, Nyeri and elsewhere on January 27 calling on the government to move from cosmetic acknowledgment of the violence against women, to actually doing something like increasing women representation in public offices.
“The change we want from the ministry of gender to all committees is to increase women representation. I sit in parliament and I can tell you the women have a raw deal we do not get anything through because most of the committees are three quarter men and just a few women. Even the ones that are there to support the women’s cause,” Kisumu women Rep Ruth Odinga said.
“We have enough women, enough feminists, enough young people to populate these offices,” she said.
Following the anti femicide protests in Kenya, public debate has raged on whether there is an actual increase in the number of women being killed, or the anecdotal cases being sighted by the media were playing up to a case of Poisson clumping .
@Stats_Kenya posted a trend graph on homicides by gender which showed only 706 were females in 2021 as opposed to 2090 men in the same year. The gap in the trend had been consistent since 2014.
But for women, even one more women being killed just because they are women is one too many.
Kenyan women have struggled to overcome monumental patriarchy over the years growing economic opportunities that has offered females more freedom and independence.
However women have struggled to alter entrenched patriarchal structure with inordinate number of men filling bureaucratic spaces.
According to the International Monetary Fund, Kenya’s female labor force participation is lower than for men and the wage gap is sizeable. Equally important, women spend a significant amount of time on unpaid care work within the household, including fetching water, owing to traditional gender roles.
In fact, gender gaps are generally more pronounced in Kenya than in other EAC countries, which goes to showing Kenya specific gender exclusion.
The impact can be dire, women are less likely to report gender based crimes to authorities which are mostly male dominated.
They say whenever they make reports to male authorities, they are more likely to be blamed for the attack and shamed as prostitutes who deserve the violence.
Ms Odinga said the only way to address this was to push for meaningful representation of women in the police force, leadership, and state bureaucracy in line with the constitution.
“If you had women head the police divisions and head the security of these counties you will see the change. There will be less of us going to the police stations populated by male policemen who then harass the same women and when you go there you are called a prostitute,” Ms Odinga said.
“That is the truth, we have gender based violence desks at the police stations what are they doing there if we are being molested and harassed and even given death threats in your own house and when you go to the police station unaambiwa na polisis that wewe ndio uliprovoke the man,” she said
It is not that all policemen are bad, the male officers guided the Kisumu protests well, managing the traffic and leading what was surprisingly a very organised outbursts. No shops were closed as the protesters in somber black kept lane discipline.
When they broke down in traditional mourning, Uuuwi! Tumbling on hot tarmac wailing for victims memorialized by placards and solidarity.
An officer Boen Rono met this street kid on the pavement sniffing glue and snatched the bottle, in exchange giving the youth a bottle of water. The little gesture was not lost to the urchin who joined the march in hope the policeman would get tired of carrying the glue.
After the march, I took a boda boda to find my car. I had abandoned it around Kisumu’s Kondele area where the protests had kicked off.
Kisumu is relatively safe, but this safety is underwritten by outright violence. Thieves are murdered in cold blood, stoned and burned at the stake.
“Where you are coming from, is there a preacher?” the boda boda asks me.
I tell him its a women’s march to end femicide, that there area lot of cases where women are being killed because they are women, a lot of intimate partner violence and such.
He agrees, and cites a case where a woman was recently killed in the area he lives. But then he falls back quickly on the popular narrative that it is the women’s fault.
I differ, scattering my words into the hot draughts of wind, but manage to tell him, there’s no reason anyone should be killed because they have gone out on a date and chose not to have sex with a man.
But he goes on the defense he says there are men who will kill anyone who crosses them leave alone those who steal from them, and that women drug men with mchele- so somehow they get what is coming to them.
Yet the reality is that femicide does not affect these kinds of women, according to Africa Uncensored, 75 percent of femicide cases and killings were committed by a person who knew the murdered woman – an intimate partner, relative or friend.
It underlies the biggest challenge which feminists are encountering, a male population that is not ready to face the fact that this is not about the number of men being killed. But of the assurance for women to exist without abuse, trauma and a death sentence hanging over them for just being born female.
