If every Kenyan woman could add her heartfelt phrase to complete the sentence, there would be any number of responses in the range of slightly over 15 million – the number of women that make up half of Kenya’s population of 31 million people.

With just under 17 months to go to the general elections in 2007, Kenyan women with ambitions for elective office are back to the drawing board and counting their options out of a rapidly shifting set of possibilities.

To the discomfiture of the incumbents, Kenyan voters are an angry lot and the political weather forecast for 2007 looks advantageous to the aspiring candidates.

According to the latest polls, 54.2 percent of Kenyans do not think their MPs deserve to be re-elected, while 38.7 percent may just go ahead and elect them. This is good news for some and very bad news for others but for both camps this scenario calls for strategy and rethinking.

The answers lie in what the voters want and the planning must take this lesson to heart. The top ten factors for election strategists to watch are: Employment creation; poverty reduction; economic recovery; corruption; security; agricultural growth; education; infrastructure; HIV/AIDS and the constitution review.

At a meeting for women leaders organized by the League of Kenya Women’s Voters (LKWV) in Nairobi recently, nominated Members of Parliament Prof. Ruth Oniang’o and Dr. Julia Ojiambo rallied both women aspirants to elective public office as well as the incumbents around the possibility of working on a winning strategy for 2007.

Dr Julia Ojiambo will be putting in her bid for the presidency as will ‘Mama ODM’, Nazlin Omar, who is closely associated with the Orange Democratic Movement and member party Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that caused the government’s humiliating defeat at the 2005 referendum – when the proposed new constitution was voted down. Many voters used the referendum merely as means to voice their approval or disapproval of the government.

Another factor that cannot be ignored is that although women constitute the majority of the population they are underrepresented in decision-making and governance structures. Women’s leadership and participation in public life is still held captive by strong patriarchal mindsets.

Going by the results of the just concluded by-elections in Nakuru, Moyale, Saku, Laisamis and North Horr, women can expect those same barriers to be lifted up against them in the forthcoming political contests leading to the 2007 general elections.

Although Prof. Oniango’s address to the workshop participants, many of whom are aspirants for 2007, appealed to the human and sensitive side being a woman politician, she did make the point that they can expect to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. This one is a tough call.

However, as pointed out by Nairobi University’s professor of linguistics and communication skills, Okoth Okombo women will need more than determination and a winning attitude to get the posts they seek. They will also need to move their campaigns beyond the confines of seminar rooms and workshops in order to give Kenyan voters a chance to make their decisions.

“It will require a good strategy and an intimate understanding of the situation to get as many women as possible into positions of leadership,” says Prof. Okombo, “In politics, no one will treat you like a lady, and women must transform themselves into politicians.”

According to Ms Omar, women and youth must have a fall-back plan for 2007: “All the prevailing parties have manifestos with great potential for women and youth but they are not implementable,” she adds.

“The goings-on in most parties are proof that there is no space for women and youth to participate meaningfully.”

Ms Omar, highly visible in the ODM, will be steering clear of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) with which she has been closely associated: “The field is already very crowded in there,” she says, “I am walking a tight rope, but I am also seeking to create space in which to negotiate power for the youth and women’s vote and this may justify forming an entirely new party that infuses new blood.”

The immediate pitfalls women aspirants must look out for are in their own safety, surviving the violence, the party nomination system, the cost of the campaigns, corruption and voter attitudes.

Clearly these are issues to do with the rules of the game, participation and the skills for participation. Women attest to the bad language, insults and outright acts of violence against them on the campaign trail.

Is it entirely impossible to guarantee a violence-free elections campaign? The word from Prof. Okombo is that women should enter the campaigns with a plan for a worst-case scenario and prepare to dig themselves in for a tough fight to conquer the party nominations first.

“The managers and entire campaign team must work out a good defence strategy that ensures the candidate gets to parliament at the end of the electioneering stage alive!”

Women must also confront the issue of resource mobilization head on. Even in the absence of corruption, political campaigns require a huge amount of financial and material resources and knowing where the money is going to come from is critical to the candidate’s strategy.

“Politics is expensive,” says Prof. Okombo, “If you add corruption to it, the floodgates are open to limitless expenditure and a situation where the Electoral Commission of Kenya’s (ECK) guidelines and rules of fair play are ignored.”

Women are generally less endowed financially and the availability of adequate financial resources is a key factor as they venture into competitive politics. According to the reflections of the Kenya Women’s Political Caucus on the experience of women in the 2002 General elections published in the organisation’s Election Monitoring Report of 2003, women rated lack of family support only second to financial constraints among the factors hindering their participation.

The executive director of the League of Kenya Women Voters (LKWV), Ms Irene Oloo says there is growing concern that support by women’s organizations for women aspirants is scattered.

“For instance, why were women absent from the candidature for the mayoral elections in July?” she poses.

She points out that on the one hand, women are absent from party structures and the politics within them while on the other hand their impact is not being felt in the voters’ register.

This fact is borne out by the 2003 election monitoring report by the Kenya Women’s Political Caucus which pointed out that political party nominations serve an intra-party mechanism for sieving out and selecting popular candidates to present for the ultimate electoral contest against other competing political parties.

Under the current laws, the conduct of party nominations for parliamentary and presidential nominations is guided by the constitutions of the respective competing parties.

With the exception Dr Julia Ojiambo, who owns her own party, the Labour Party of Kenya (LPK), presidential candidate Nazlin Omar and hundreds of women aspirants to parliamentary and civic seats know only too well about what they are up against in the parties they seek to present their candidature to.

Their predicament is precisely what women’s human rights and social justice networks have risen consistently – that affirmative action is one of the most effective short-term measures for narrowing the gender gaps in political systems. This is the reason affirmative action needs to be addressed comprehensively through explicit constitutional provisions that require political parties to abide by certain minimum standards.

In the words of Prof. Okoth Okombo, women must be seen to be making a difference for Kenya: “The transformation will not take place in the election month in 2007. Rather, it takes place when women are actively involved in setting the elections agenda.”

In other words, the time is now. The good news according to recent polls is that Kenyan attitudes towards women’s candidature are becoming more favourable. Although 48.1 percent of respondents said they were unlikely to vote a female candidate for parliament, 40.3 percent said they would go ahead and vote her in. Campaigners should keep their eye on the 8.6 percent that are undecided about where to place their vote and the 2.5 percent that said they didn’t know what they would do with their vote. Add these figures to the 40.3 percent and one begins to see the possibility of upsetting the opposing camp!