By Robert Nyasato
I miss the era of iron-fisted women.
The kind of women who took the podium and made the atmosphere reverberate. Women who articulated issues affecting Kenyans with surgical precision, debating policy, budgets, and injustice without ever leaning on gender as a shield or shortcut. Their argument was their armor.
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They were not appointed to be visible. They were elected to be formidable—women who fiercely faced men in the ballot box, constituency after constituency, and won on ideas, grit, and groundwork.
That era lasted long enough to shape a generation of political consciousness, but it now seems to be fading just as Kenya has poured billions into affirmative initiatives: nominations to county assemblies, the Women Representative seats, party lists, and the two-thirds gender principle.
The examples remain etched in public memory: Martha Karua, the “Iron Lady,” staring down presidents without blinking; Charity Ngilu, who dared a presidential bid in 1997 and governed ministries with firm resolve; Catherine Nyamato, who carried the voice of Gusii women into national debates with unflinching clarity.
Although Nyamato entered the August House through nomination, she had earlier mounted a spirited fight for the West Mugirango parliamentary seat, even compelling President Moi’s political machinery to accommodate her through a KANU nomination.
Others abound: Phoebe Asiyo, Wangari Maathai, Grace Onyango—women who did not ask for space at the table; they built their own and invited the nation. They set the pace, tone, and bar.
Unfortunately, women of such political steel are increasingly rare in the current dispensation. The fire has dimmed. Too many have traded the battlefield of competitive politics for the safety of reserved slots.
Boldness has been replaced by caution, ideology by patronage, and national vision by county-level ceremony.
The situation is even starker in conservative communities such as the Abagusii of Western Kenya, where six decades after independence, no woman has been elected to an open seat—MP, Senator, or Governor. Not one. The ground remains difficult, the cultural soil still unturned, and power largely male-dominated.
The affirmative seats created under the 2010 Constitution—Woman Representative, nominated MCAs, and nominated Senators—were meant to be a ladder, not a lounge. They were designed as platforms for empowerment, visibility, and experience, preparing women to compete equally with men in open political contests.
But many beneficiaries have drifted from that intention. Instead of using these positions as stepping stones, some cling to them term after term, treating them as permanent entitlements rather than transitional opportunities.
They do not always mentor successors. They rarely step aside to contest for MP or Governor, leaving little room for the next generation of women to rise. The ladder, in many cases, appears pulled up after the first climbers ascended.
And so the era of iron-fisted women fades—not because society stopped believing in them, but because the system designed to multiply them has, in practice, contained them.
What is missing is not just their courage. It is the standard they set: that leadership must be earned, not assigned; that equality must be practiced, not performed.
