At a time when the government has confessed that it’s suffering from money-related marasmus, someone has sponsored a Bill in the National Assembly of Kenya seeking to waste cartons of printing paper in defining what “marriage” is.
Marriage, in the contemporary Kenyan context, is neither voluntary — as the genius behind The Family Protection Bill 2023 may want us to imagine — nor do the parties have equal rights and obligations.
This is the same country that celebrates like Arsenal fans when widows get dispossessed of matrimonial property, laugh at men who suffer depression from marital stress, ask survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) why they forgot to turn the other cheek, and insist to men that the only cologne they should wear is some town in West Germany.
This is the same country where child marriages are supposed to be illegal yet, on average, one in three girls have had husbands before 18.
The curve rises steeply as you head northwards into the arid and semi-arid badlands. In vast swathes of this country where wrinkly men staggering on bent sticks are still the community’s North Star, children giving birth to children is regarded as an act of cultural purity and anyone who raises a finger runs the risk of attracting prayers for it to wither on sight.
The Bill also seeks to recognise and promote the family as the natural and fundamental unit of Kenyan society and the necessary basis of social order. Members of Parliament stomping their feet in affirmation are advised to take the advice of Arsenal fans and not celebrate too early, because they’d be walking into a giant manhole.
All it will take for MPs to shoot down this amendment is for one person to suggest that the clause be expanded to prescribe the death sentence for male MPs who abandon their biological children and robbery with violence for female MPs who break into marital homes without the consent of the woman of the house.
The brains behind this Bill also sneaked in miscellaneous provisions that prohibit homosexuals and other associated persons from adopting, fostering and offering any other forms of family-based care to children. However, family experts have noticed that the Bill is pin-drop silent on the most important demographic who are not supposed to be entrusted with the future of our children – Kenyan politicians.
They might not be vocal about it, but our children still haven’t forgotten that the people who promised a laptop to each of the 2013 Class One cohort of pupils have not only refused to apologise 10 years later but have also been rewarded with higher office.
Without a scintilla of guilt, the Kenyan politician will convert poor children’s bursary money into their first-class air ticket for a suntan in the Maldives, and watch teenage girls soak in period blood every month as they debate on whether the only Jubilee remaining is that of the insurance company.
Then there’s the subtle threat in the Bill that intends to give the state powers to limit the broadcasting, production, circulation or dissemination of any material or publication that promotes pornography.
Trending videos
To put the level of concern to the test, a qualitative behavioural scientist travelled to a rural outpost this week with two separate trending videos each of a prominent Kenyan.
In one village, where women were boiling wild fruits for their infants whose bodies had begun shutting down, the video was played of the President on an executive dais bedecked in glittering pomp; behind him, a herd of religious leaders, belching the remnants of oily soup as the President promised to lower the cost of maize flour for starving Kenyans this passing week.
The other video was that of a belly dancer in a cosy room whose interior architecture only watches poverty on the television mounted on its wall. There are no prizes as to which of the two motion pictures caused the spleen of those starving women to excrete unprintable words.
Kenyans have 99 problems and monitoring what adults watch on their phones isn’t one. It’s more than 21 days into a new month and civil servants are yet to be paid their living wage for work done.
Instead of seeking to know what special communication skills civil servants are deploying to convince their landlords to extend their benevolence shelf life, the proponents of this Bill are having sleepless nights imagining what two people of the same reproductive biology could be discussing in a ventilated room that they never built with their own money.
Those who fear history should be reminded that not long ago in this country, we had a President who planted secret service agents inside university lecture halls to pick political chatter and report back with a list of those whose views were considered borderline radical.
They would later be picked up at ungodly hours and thereafter dropped in a standing pool of neck-deep freezing water until they confessed to imagining that the President could stop breathing and permanently rest on his back.
Those were days when model husbands feared confiding in their wives about intimate family secrets because the entire country was made to believe that the President was the unseen guest at every meal and the silent listener to every conversation.
Every time a fly raced across the bedroom wall, the conversation was put in abeyance until a scalpel was found to prise open the abdomen until a recording device was retrieved under the rumen.
The current President has made it clear that one will sell him fear — not even those threatening to convert the streets of Nairobi into a bi-weekly teargas bonanza.
Fear is also something the Deputy President has also vowed not to buy, even if he has loose change from our rice and beef stew money that the government returned to him before he started climbing Mt Kenya.
We love reminding ourselves that we were created in the image of God, but quickly replace the image of God with that of our tribal lords when application papers for job openings arrive at the desk of the appointing authority.
The only way Kenyans can lend their support to the current bilateral talks, is if the two sparring camps included the discussion on replacing the cockerel on our Coat of Arms with that of an ostrich burying its head in the sand. BY DAILY NATION