Kicking the can down the road.

The last time we had a fifty-fifty split in politics, it made for an acrimonious relationship in which those eating on one sine of the split felt as if they were getting crumbs while the other side was supping on the fatter bits of the loaf. But that was small potatoes. We went ahead and doubled down and decreed that there would be a gender split, reserving at least one third of all appointive and elective positions to one gender or the other depending on the facts on the ground.

That constitutional provision threatened to scuttle the 2013 general election; the Supreme Court saved our bacon with some asinine reasoning and we decided to keep kicking the can down the road until we found some work around to the lunacy of the Two-thirds Rule. That day is nigh. The can has reached the end of the road. It is time for Parliament, the constitutional commissions and independent offices to put up or shut up. Parliament, in the odious guise of the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee of the National Assembly, has fired the first salvo.

The train is about come off the rails with the concurrent proposals of the Commission on Revenue Allocation and the man who sat atop the decision-making tree when we came up with the devolution formula that gave us so much angina in 2012. It wants the number of constituencies to be reduced to 150. The price of pork is about to go through the roof because pigs have a likelier chance of taking flight than the current cabal of brahmins, nabobs, nawabs and satraps culling their numbers to 150 from 290. I can see the same hardline stance being taken as was taken when the High Court said that jurisdiction over the Constituency Development Fund be given to the devolved government.

It is not easy looking your mother, sister, wife, daughter or mistress in the eye when you know that, as a man, you don't really see her as a valuable member of society, and that, in your mind, her contribution to governance is negligible and her place in the economy of the nation is by your sufferance. In the past two weeks a sixteen year old has suffered second-degree and third-degree burns over her body at the hands of her sixty-year old "husband" and the First Lady has yet again delivered another medical token to yet another county that simply will not put money down so that the Beyond Zero campaign can be launched in communities that truly need it - like Somalia or South Sudan.

Not one county has a woman governor, though Embu briefly had an acting woman governor when Martin Wambora was busily reshaping the Judiciary in his image. Not one. But it has forty seven female woman representatives, some of whom still think that it is a hoot to miss important votes in the National Assembly so that they can hold the First Lady's hand as she puts out her begging bowl for - you got it! - Beyond Zero. (Their Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts are quite illuminating about what they think about the Two-thirds Rule.)

The time do the right thing is always right now, unless the vested interests are about to experience the discomfittingly bracing winds of change. Tell me if you think this is anywhere near the spirit of the Two-thirds Rule: Not one of the 47 governors is a woman; less than one third of the deputy governors are women; less than one third of the Principal Secretaries are women; the heads of the Judiciary, the national Executive, the houses of Parliament are all men - men, it seems, who think that the end of the road only needs another tender and we can keep kicking that can down the shiny new road.