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Political parties, high on rhetoric and low in action

“Are women aspirants aware of political party constitutions and are they deliberately choosing political parties to run on based on their gender commitment?”

This question was directed at the female aspirants who attended the Gender Forum dubbed “Who has what for women?” – A gender audit of political parties ‘and constitutions and manifestos. Njeri Kabeberi, Executive Director- Centre for Multiparty Democracy sought to find out if female aspirants were holding their parties accountable to the promises they gave in their manifestos and constitutions.

At the Forum organized by the Henrich Boll Foundation, Jeniffer Miano of the Governance and Rule of Law Programme- UNDP Sudan took us through a presentation on political parties and their gender commitments. Indeed there are many promises to women by political parties. Sadly they only reside in the constitutions and manifestos of these parties. From holding workshops for women to accelerate political and economic participation, creating gender unit to safeguard women’s rights,  to a third representation in all party organs as well as reserved seats for women. The Democratic Party (DP) stands out alleging that a DP Government would have a female vice president, deputy prime minister, 5 ministers and 10 assistant ministers.

It was shocking to realize that SDP, a party on whose platform we saw the first the female presidential candidate, Hon. Charity Ngilu just mentions gender in passing.

That not withstanding we observed that every political party in one way or another saw the need for gender equality. It should then follow that political parties should be the main change agent for realizing increased female participation in public leadership which is of course not the case.

“There is no clear road map of how parties are going ahead to achieve gender equality in their party structures or nomination processes,” reported Jeniffer Miano, who so ably took the participants through the audit of political parties. She called on the need for audit mechanisms to be put in place to ensure that political parties were not heavy on rhetoric and low on action.

In our previous issue, “Political parties as the wheels of change for gender balance”, we conducted an analysis of political parties based on their gender commitments and the number of women they were able to deliver to parliament. As you would expect there were serious discrepancies between their gender commitments and actual nominations.

Recommendations were made to ensure that political parties don’t push gender issues to the periphery of their agenda. “We must begin by not clustering women’s issues together with those of the youth. That’s how women’s issues get sidelined.” Among the proposals was to review the ECK policy documents to be more progressive towards gender, put in place a political party bill, monitor funding for women in political parties, institutionalize political parties, put in place a gender policy framework that will be audited for progress as well as strengthen women’s leagues in political parties.

Finally, get involved in bringing about change in your party by holding your political party accountable.

By Irene Githua
28th July, 2007

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