Martha Karua Told Women Leaders to Compete on Competence

Speaking at a Kenya Women Parliamentarians Association meeting in Nairobi, People's Liberation Party leader Martha Karua challenged women leaders to focus on competence and ability as they seek elective positions ahead of the 2027 General Election, and urged them to treat rivals with respect.

It is a short intervention with two arguments inside it, and both are directed at a political culture rather than at a rule.

The competence argument

The implicit claim is that women aspirants have been positioned, by others and sometimes by themselves, as beneficiaries of a rule rather than as contenders.

Kenya's constitutional two-thirds gender requirement has produced sixteen years of argument about mechanisms and comparatively little about candidates. The proposed Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026 would shift the obligation onto parties at nomination stage.

Karua's point is that a quota is a floor and not a case. A candidate who campaigns on the rule invites the response that she is there because of it. A candidate who campaigns on a record does not.

That is uncomfortable and it is strategically correct.

The respect argument

Aimed at something more specific than civility.

Kenyan politics is a hostile environment for women candidates in ways that are documented rather than impressionistic. Karua herself was attacked at Mukuru kwa Reuben and condemned it publicly, and the country's human rights commission has been recording political intolerance and intimidation through 2026.

In that environment, women candidates attacking each other publicly supplies material to people who will use it against all of them. That is a practical observation about a shared vulnerability rather than a request for good manners.

What "competence" means in a nomination room

Worth translating, because the word is abstract and the decision is not.

A nomination board under a gender quota is not asking whether a woman is capable in general. It is asking whether she can win a specific seat, because a quota filled with losing candidates costs the party seats.

The answer to that question is evidence: named ward coordinators, a volunteer roster with completed tasks against it, members recruited, agent recruitment under way, and a record of household contact.

An aspirant who can produce that is answering the electability question with documents. One who cannot is asking to be believed.

The window

Nomination rules are certified on 30 October 2026 and primaries conclude by 8 May 2027. If the gender reform passes, boards will be looking for winnable women candidates on that compressed timetable.

They will find the ones who are already visible. Which makes the next few months, rather than next spring, the period that decides who is on the list.

Related: Martha Karua's 2027 case.

The obstacles a quota does not touch

Two, and they are the ones women candidates in Kenya name most often.

Money. Kenyan campaigns are expensive and women aspirants have historically faced greater difficulty raising the sums involved. The proposed Women Inclusion and Political Participation Fund is aimed at training and capacity rather than campaign finance, so this remains.

Violence and intimidation. Documented, and disproportionately directed at women candidates. It is a stated reason capable people decline to stand, and no nomination rule addresses it.

What a campaign can do about the second is plan for it: marshals at events, a named security liaison, routes kept internal, incidents recorded the same day with time-stamped evidence, and a clear rule about who has authority to end an event.

That is not a solution. It is preparation, which is a smaller and more achievable thing and it is what is available.