Dicks! I see dicks everywhere!

The United States, from which we have borrowed a great deal of our recent statutory political infrastructure, and the United Kingdom, from which we inherited much of our political traditions, are served by two main parties, representing the two main political ideologies in each: conservatism (Republican Party, the Tories) and liberalism (Democratic Party, Labour). Kenya, like many if not most African countries, doesn't really have ideological political divisions; it has tribal ones based on ethnic identities and ethnic animosities that have been responsible for a great deal since the liberation wave began in the 1950s.

The lack of ideological divisions in Kenya has encouraged some of the stupidest political antics in the world, and this includes the lunacies of the Bihar State Assembly, the paid-to-cry antics of the Filipino parliament, the chair-hurling passions resident in the Ukraine national assembly and the let-sleeping-dogs-lie somnambulence in neighbouring Uganda. I blame all the settlers who made the Happy Valley their home; those drug-addled, sex-crazed, murderous never-going-to-be-landed-gentry are the reason why political competition in Kenya, eventually, has to have a politician mentioning someone's johnson—and whether it has undergone the cut or not. After all, if the mzungu settler who brought us organised serikali obsessed about these things, then it must be okay, right?

In 2011 a leading presidential candidate, in what I thought was an orchestrated moment of pique, argued that another candidate was unfit to lead because of a cultural shibboleth that that other candidate's tribe did not ordinarily subscribe to. That candidate was succeeded in his constituency by another candidate who loudly and vehemently repeated the same slur. This morning a leading tabloid has, on its front page, emblazoned a similar slur by one politician against another.

In the absence of a coherent ideology, our politics will, for the immediate future, be about dicks. No, that is not an euphemism. We face serious challenges to our fundamental rights and freedoms, both from the State and non-state actors. These challenges will not addressed simply some people still live in a world where "the cut" is a true measure of leadership qualities. In the absence of an ideology, it is easy to jump from one political vehicle—bus—to another: each is a caricature of the other. The only thing that seems to matter is that the bus gets one to the seat of power, not that it has the capacity to cohere its members to an idea of what their country could and should be.

The irony of a largely educated population held in thrall by talk of circumcision rather than political ideas is not lost on some. For the first time, more women in Kenya are graduating from law schools than men. I don't think they are interested in circumcision the way their leading politicians are, not when the anti-FGM campaign is in full swing. Overall, more women are graduating from universities than men, and maybe one day it will dawn on the overwhelmingly male political class that obsessing about other men's dicks is not the way to winning the educated and liberated woman's vote. Or resolving the economic challenges of the day, like runaway youth unemployment.