When Nakuru Senator Susan Kihika, now the Nakuru Governor, tabled before the floor of the Senate an amendment Bill on reproductive healthcare, perhaps she didn’t anticipate the kind of opposition it received from the clergy and, notably, the political class. This was in July 2020, the time around which the country was witnessing a spike in teenage pregnancies and sexual violence.
“Recently reported numbers of teen pregnancies across the country since the Covid-19 lockdown of schools are certainly beyond reality and are simply meant to set an obvious but sinister agenda…the proposed Comprehensive Sexuality Education and the Reproductive Healthcare Bill are poisoned chalice that we should never allow into our society,” former head of Christ Is The Answer (CITAM) church, David Oginde, wrote in his column in the Sunday Standard on June 28, 2020.
The Bill seemed to have succumbed to the pandemic of misinformation that has thrived with the emergence of corona virus pandemic; the political class together with the heads of religious institutions, for some reason, misinterpreted the Bill. They claimed it advocated for abortion and undermined morality among children which is actually not true. In truth, the Bill sought to address some important aspects of the Kenyan law with regard to reproductive health, particularly abortion – which remains the leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality in Kenya. Of the 316, 560 cases of abortion procured in the country every year, almost 50% involve women aged between 14 and 24. Another 120, 000 women and girls are hospitalized each year due to abortion-related complications.
Apparently, the question of abortion and sex education has been undermined by Kenya’s petty politics of morality. It’s those who command influence and audience in Kenya, like in pretty every social unit, that shape this whole narrative on morality: The political class and religious institutions.
Allow me start with the religious institutions – hereafter referred to as the church – I will come to the political class later.
Essentially, as political theorist Rajeev Bhargava notes, the state should be separated from religious institutions to check religious tyranny, oppression, hierarchy or sectarianism and to promote religious and non-religious freedom equalities and solidarity among citizens. If the Kenyan story has separated itself from its religious institutions, the separation has perhaps taken place in a different planet. Everybody knows that the church in Kenya has been captured. It cannot speak its truth. It’s no longer the moral majority, having gone to bed with the state. As such, the church in Kenya, as is the case in Iran (no pun intended) has become a sort of political institution.
A brief look at countries that entered into an intimate relationship with the church reminds us that a theocracy – a form of government in which God or a deity is recognized as the supreme civil ruler – is chaotic and a highly paternalistic moral police.
When the administration of George W. Bush attacked Iraq in 2003 killing hundreds of innocent Iraqis, despite objection by United Nations Security Council, President Bush said it was God who told him to do so. America was and is still not a theocracy, but its president allowed theocratic principles to guide his decisions, at the expense of innocent civilians. Remember Bush had once prevented a medical research that was trying to look into safe abortion practice when he was Governor of Texas.
Most people remember the famous incident that happened in Florida in July 1994. American reverend Paul Hill killed Dr John Britton, whom, according to Hill, was facilitating the procurement of abortions, and his bodyguard James Barret in the Britton’s clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Hill said he killed Britton to avoid future deaths of innocent babies. The least we talk about how religious absolutism operated in God-fearing Afghanistan under the Taliban where homosexuals were buried alive the better.
The church in Kenya enjoys immense following. According to the 2019 national population census, more than 85% – roughly 46.9 million people – of Kenyans are Christians while another 11% – approximately 5.2 million people – are Muslims. How the church therefore defines morality or what it chooses to consider as right or wrong, as far as human conduct is concerned, has a direct impact (sometimes with far-reaching health implications) on a significant number of Kenyans.
A study conducted by Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) and Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance (RHRA) concluded that stigmatization by religion drives young women to procure abortion, and that religion doesn’t play a significant role in youth sexuality other than influencing use and access of contraception. An estimated 13, 000 Kenyan girls drop out of school annually as a result of pregnancies, and about 17% of girls have had sex, under some form of force, before the age of 15. The research also found out that religious parents/guardians often force their pregnant adolescents to procure abortion.
Another research by Marie Stopes International indicates that 41% of unintended pregnancies end up being aborted. Almost 2, 600 women and girls die annually due to abortion or its related complications, an average of seven deaths every day. At least 64.8 % of girls from Korogocho slum who had procured abortion in 2010 were Christians and 60% were between the age of 18 and 22 year.
‘Safe’ abortions, as Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) notes, are economically out of reach for most of the victims of sexual violence. This leaves victims with no option but to procure unsafe abortions. Also, reproductive health facilities are not friendly to sexually active adolescents; a major factor that has contributed to limited knowledge on safe sex practice among adolescents. Studies also show that young and poorly educated women and girls are more likely to procure abortion compared to their rich and educated peers. To reduce cases of teen pregnancies, comprehensive sex education is clearly needed. The position of the church that the figures on teen pregnancies have been blown out of proportion by “hawks” to achieve private ends is neither here nor there. At any rate, cases of sexual assault aren’t matters to be judged based on how many happen in truth. Even a single case is enough to prompt action. The reality of life as it is lived in low-income areas where sexual abuse, extreme poverty and low levels of education expose women and girls to sexual violence, unwanted pregnancies and diseases is increasingly not captured in the church’s approach to the question of morality.
But even if these figures were exaggerated and such researches funded by donors, as the church argues, it is difficult to overlook the seriousness of the matter. They say numbers don’t lie. Kenyans are still procuring abortion whether the church approves of it or not. Is it not necessary then to make laws that guide that process in order to save lives? Teenage pregnancies will remain on the rise until we come up with practical solutions. Banning pornography (to which I am coming) as Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha has consistently advised isn’t the panacea to the problem. The church argues that the best way to address teen pregnancies is by teaching values in schools. Whilst this is important, it’s equally a knee-jerk response. You can teach children to abstain from sex, but you cannot claim control over their decision to indulge in it. Susan Kihika’s Reproductive Healthcare (Amendment) Bill 2020 reminds us that we ought to strive to strengthen children’s understanding of their sexuality and bodies. The challenge comes in when the church is opposed to those who call for practical interventions; referring to them as, in the words of David Oginde, “hawks with less than positive intentions”.
In short, the church in Kenya has no authority to execute its traditional role of the moral police for two reasons. One, it has been invaded by corrupt political forces which operate as gangsters. Some of the most divisive political statements bordering on ethnic solidarity and/or trial hatred have been made in the altar of the house of our Lord. Two, by speaking to the acceptable standards of human conduct as far as morality is concerned (for example, abortion, sex education in schools, use of contraceptives etc.) from a conservative position without calling for practical policy interventions, the church is denying the undeniable. Millions of lives are put in great danger as a result of the church’s position on some of these issues. Remember in the early 90s when the Catholic Church, in Uganda for instance, objected the use of condoms even as HIV continued to disproportionately ravage the world population? The issue here isn’t that the church in Kenya is speaking about that which it should traditionally be speaking to; the problem is that it doesn’t have the moral purity to speak about it in the first place. As Persians say, you cannot live under one roof but forecast two different weathers.
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What role do politicians exactly play in shaping and/or preserving morality? And how has the Kenyan political class performed in this front? I will attempt to interrogate. First and foremost, Kenyan politics is populist in organisation and evil in all ways. By populist I mean those who invest in it are motivated chiefly by pursuit of some sort of personality cult.
“Politics is in itself evil,” Kenyan writer Oyunga Pala told me recently when I sought his views on morality as a question of political power.
World over, populist politicians use their sway to define what’s moral and what’s not. On most occasions they craft the type of morality that allows the end to justify the means of their political actions and decisions. Kenyan society seems to be functioning exactly on this type of morality.
Embakasi East MP Paul Ongili, better known as Babu Owino, published a controversial tweet in 2019 that came out for violence against women. He wrote:
“Alice Wahome must respect Baba (former Prime Minister Raila Odinga) and president Uhuru or we will shave every part of her body that has hair. This is not a threat it’s a promise”
In the same thread, he detractively told off Nairobi City County Member of Parliament Esther Passaris for construing his tweet (quoted above) within the obvious context. He wrote:
“I know you (Esther Passaris) are in that time of the month. So I will not engage hormones”
The self-styled former university student leader is one of the Kenya politicians who has mastered the art of employing sexism in mainstream politics to acquire the right type of charm and authority that can survive the highly slippery Kenyan political landscape. Max Weber sarcastically called this kind of charm the “charismatic” part of leadership.
Our morality as a country has decayed because we have converted immoral behaviors and language into a political fad. Political rallies in Kenya are platforms where pejorative slogans are conceived and unleashed in order to grab and maintain the attention of the masses, in the end cultivating the right personality cult that can win elections.
The people we have trusted with political power have used their positions to destroy the original morality as we know it. By incorporating the use of lewd rhetoric in mainstream politics, Kenyan politicians have compromised the people’s collective perspective on the former’s immoral actions.
But, as we have said, the role that politicians play in undermining morality isn’t a Kenyan question. Across the world, populist politicians have gone on record as irredeemable sexists. Former U.S President Donald J. Trump will be remembered for, other than his disastrous four-year stay at the Whitehouse, his belittling and offensive language against women. He made headlines in 2005 with his “grabbing women by the pussy” comment in a Hollywood show. In 2016, at the run up to presidential elections, he wrote on twitter, in reference to journalist Megyn Kelly, then a news anchor at Fox News;
“You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever”
It’s instructive to note, however, that American populism didn’t start with President Trump. The rise of Andrew Jackson to power in 1824 – having served less than a year in the Senate – marked the birth of America populism. Jackson had become a national hero after the battle of New Orleans where he led the mixed strategy of treaty-making and war-making, conceived to remove all Indians living in the Southern United states to lands to the West.
President Rodrigo Duterte of Philippines, another populist, will go in history books as a proud sexist who thrived on manipulating and humiliating women within and without his circle. In 2016, then the major of Davao City, he was quoted saying, with reference to a rape incident that involved an Australian missionary during a prison riot:
“But she was so beautiful; the major (he) should have been first. What a waste”
President Duterte enjoys in-fine-feather public likability, thanks to a long history of vulgar outburst and use of crass and defaming language on women.
Sex, as it has been said, is a political weapon that can be employed to perpetuate consensual domination. By understanding what resonates with their audience, politicians use public platforms to cultivate the right personality cult, primarily for self-preservation. In his charming novel The Child in Time, Ian McEwan uses the term “democratic pornography” to describe the process by which his fellow creatures are being humiliated and manipulated by those who hold political power. The personality cult that Kenyan (sexist) politicians strive for essentially operates as some sort of democratic pornography. In a country like Kenya where silence and resistance jump together, the effectiveness of any language that speaks to the effervescence of the passions cannot be underestimated.
Majority of Kenyans on social media have found fault with a Bill sponsored by Garissa town MP Aden Duale that seeks to criminalize publication of pornographic material by amending the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018. If approved by parliament and signed into law by the President, anybody who shares pornographic content will be fined Sh20 million or face a jail term of 25 years, or both.
In the same Bill, the former majority leader proposes that those found guilty of publishing information that could compromise the security of the country be fined five million shillings or be jailed for a maximum period of ten years. Most Kenyans, while noting the absurdity of the reparations of each offence, argue that the Bill is misplaced and that Duale ought to have addressed more urgent national issues like the roll-out of Covid-19 vaccine or how to tame corruption at Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (KEMSA). In addition, some have argued that the consumption of pornographic content is a personal moral choice that doesn’t pose a threat to national security, for example. Both arguments might be valid; however, they cannot defeat the fact that porn has a direct effect on the dignity of an individual. Thus, the need to address its impact on public morality is urgent in its own right. Recent research indicates that Kenya is among the top consumers of porn in Africa, alongside Nigeria and South Africa.
We must outlaw pornography if we want to restore our dignity as a people. As sociologist Gary Dworkin wrote in 1981, pornography reinforces the myth that women like to be dominated by men; it exploits and harms women who take part in it; it projects highly degrading and humiliating images of women and it probably has a thin link with sexual violence against women – either by desensitizing men to the brutality of violent domination or by encouraging direct imitation of pornographic scenes. And that’s just one side of the argument. The other one being the negative effects of internet porn on one’s health: More than 85 research studies have linked poor mental and emotional health to porn use. At the backdrop of technological revolution with the advent of smart phones and fast-speed internet, most people have become more sexually credulous without paying much attention to the dynamics of the world in which and with which they exist.
Reached for comment, Duale said he made the proposals essentially to preserve public morality and protect children from the dangerous effects of porn addiction. And that’s great of him as a leader. But what is public morality? And what role do politicians (Kenyan politicians in this case) play in defining and shaping it? Collins dictionary define morality as the conformity to the principle rules of good conduct. Public morality therefore is the code of conduct accepted by a society; it’s the nucleus of societal rectitude and integrity. Public morality is more likely to decay due to lack of acceptable civic culture than because many people are watching porn. We have to remember that civic culture is largely defined by those who wield influence in the society, politicians being one of them.
By virtue of their influence on their followers, Kenyan politicians have managed to frame a brand of morality that lives at the intersection of sexual diatribes and chauvinism. “Hii pesa sio ya mama yako bwana, this money doesn’t belong to your mother,” Duale is on record telling former Bomet governor Issack Rutto in 2015 at a public event. You wouldn’t expect such crude remarks from a leader in a country that cares and is determined to preserve its public morality.
Aden Duale is in order with his proposals. Pornography has the potential to damage the dignity of a people. People who have lost their dignity have also lost the essence of living. Without essence, one cannot partake meaningfully in the betterment of human condition in the world. But pornography is just one of the threats morality is facing today. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), for example, which is still being practiced in Kenya, is sui generis a question of public morality. If Kenyan politicians cared about preserving morality, they ought to address it as a whole by introducing relevant legislations and pushing for sufficient policy interventions where necessary. They have the power, what they increasingly lack is the will.
