Forget effemera.

If you intend to perpetrate a great swindle, the first thing that you will do is to hide in plain sight. Harry Houdini was a great illusionist; I do not know if he was a swindler. I hope he was not. But he could make an elephant disappear in a room and that is a lesson that many great swindlers have come to learn and learn well. Bernie Madoff conned hundreds of investors of many billions of dollars because he hid his great fraud in plain sight. That is a legacy to the great Harry Houdini, though I doubt very much he would see it that way.

When we were told that the President of the United States was going to visit Kenya in July, a great many men and women embarked on a mission to use his visit for great swindles. The obvious ones for the ones who chose to see revolved around that staple of political corruption in Kenya: the single-sourced tender. Unless the Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission gets off its hands, that is a game that we will continue to play till the cows come home.

Others chose to use an aspect of the United States' system to their own advantage. Their endgame remains unknown. Perhaps we will see it when the dust settles; but like all great Kenyan cons, it is unlikely that we will ever find out out what it is they were angling for and whether they got it or not.

The Supreme Court of the United States handed down a ruling in Obergefell v Hodges declaring that the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution protected the right of same-sex couples to marry and that states could not make laws outlawing the same. Kenyan politicians were quick to inform Barack Obama, the President of the United States, that when he came to visit, he should not promote "gayism" in Kenya. The Deputy President informed Kenyans, and Barack Obama, that "gayism" is not permitted in Kenya.

Whenever Kenya has had difficult to choices to make, politicians have always found a way of shrouding the choices in effemera of little consequence. There is little chance that a majority of Kenyans will support the rights of gays and lesbians and other "deviant" sexual minorities. A majority of Kenyans define themselves as people of faith and, because of their faith, they will not countenance the coming out of the Lesbians, Bisexuals, Gays, Transgenders and Intersexuals, LGBTIs. Therefore, it is baffling that the Deputy President and the Leader of the Majority Party in the National Assembly would choose to use strong language in regards to the same when there are more pressing matters that must be addressed by Parliament.

The Supreme Court of Kenya gave the national Executive an opinion in 2012 on the Two-thirds Gender Rule. It advised that the Rule should be implemented progressively. Nevertheless, despite the progressive nature of the implementation of the rule, the Supreme Court was of the opinion that the matter should be settled by August 2015. Time is running out. But you would not know it looking at the Parliamentary legislative calendar or the pronouncements of political leaders. You would, instead, be under the impression that "gayism" is the pressing political problem of the day.

We must not labour under the illusion that the Two-thirds Gender Rule is a constitutional fiction foisted on the good peoples of this Republic as a sop to foreign interests, as some politicians are wont to remind us. It is a political, social, economic and cultural imperative whose time has come. It is vital to the soul of this nation to accept that we must guarantee that all Kenyans have an opportunity to play their role in the development of our nation.

We must accept that the future is lost if cultural shibboleths continue to hold us back. The paternalism that defines us is an artifact of a bygone era. If we do not shed this artifact, consign it to history's dustbin, we are lost. Homosexuals are not the threat that politicians have made us to be. Gender inequity is.