'No' for Money

By LUCY ORIANG'

Some people have made a meal of the fact that an American group they have never heard of before intends to pour money into the ‘No’ campaign on account of abortion.

It is a misguided stand. There is no way I am saying no to tens of thousands of dollars as long as it is authentic cash. Indeed, if you were to hold a referendum today on what Kenyan women prefer — money or abortion — there would be no contest. So let the dollars rain.

There are no guarantees that we will not take the dough and run, but even life itself is a gamble. Let all roads lead to Uhuru Park on Saturday, if that is the only way to set off the avalanche of money from America. God knows we need it. We expect those who actually get to lay their hands on it not to be selfish. Tupendane!

At an entrance fee of simply the word ‘No’, this is not an opportunity to be dismissed lightly. You don’t even have to mean it. After all, it is not as if we are strangers to fraudulent elections. Money changes hands in virtually every poll we hold, even if it is just for the nursery school nutrition sub-committee.

It would be plain hypocritical for us to turn down good money, given the exchange rate against the US dollar. Not when religion has such a strong hold on our lives. The American right wing really has no reason to get jittery. At the rate at which we are praying, we will soon have one church per household.

Those of you who are mumbling beneath your breath about neo-colonialism have no leg to stand on either. Kenya is still a democracy and nothing in the proposed constitution will change that particular big picture. Many other groups have also done their own flashing of money — and we have accepted it without so much song and dance.

Arrive early at Uhuru Park. See if you can get a seat in close proximity to Bishop Mark Kariuki of the Deliverance Church of Kenya, which reportedly hosts the East African Centre for Law and Justice, the local affiliate of the stupendously rich American Center for Law and Justice.

According to Mr Jay Sekulow of the American group, this massive injection of money into Kenyan politics will help their Nairobi office convince us that the draft constitution will pave the way for abortion on demand. They are allowed to try, of course, especially now that the draft constitution has been officially launched and civic education is on the cards.

Just so you know, 35 out of 100 maternal deaths in Kenya can be put down to unsafe abortions and another 21,000 women end up in hospital for the same reason every year. The American group has, presumably, put these sinful ways out of business in the mother country.

There are some of us, of course, who will have the cheek to suggest that the good people at American Center for Law and Justice ought to have consulted widely before deciding where to put its money. The key to all of this is the women, sirs, not you or the grand churches that are coming up all over the place.

The abortion debate is one which no side can ever win. All the money in America and all the words in all the constitutions in the world will never resolve the matter, and it is pointless to peg Kenya’s destiny to something that is really between an individual and her Maker. Even nature itself is not perfect. There is such a thing as a miscarriage.

Had they conducted an opinion poll, our American friends might have found that a good chunk of Kenyan women would prefer that they throw the dollar at the myriad problems they and their daughters have to contend with, particularly poverty.

Those problems, including abortion, start with cultural regimes that put females down at virtually every stage of their lives. They include genital mutilation, son preference when it comes to education, and lack of access to tools of production such as land — not to mention moral judgment.

Kenyan women languish in large part in the lower echelons of business and rarely have access to loans and high-yielding investment opportunities. All too often, they are treated as workhorses and baby-making machines. I do not know even a single woman who is running amok in search of opportunities to get pregnant just so they can abort.

I do not know any either who have achieved pregnancy without any male input whatsoever. Yet there are never fallen men, just women. I do know many women, though, who are living in such desperate circumstances that they would give an arm and a leg to lay their hands on just a small fraction of those tens of thousands of dollars that are about to be unleashed in the war between ‘No’ and ‘Yes’.

It appears that Mr Sekulow and his boss, the televangelist Pat Robertson, have more money than they know what to do with. Send it to the poor women who live in inhuman conditions in Nairobi’s slums. Bishop Kariuki will never experience either pregnancy or abortion.

oriang.lucy@gmail.com