Source: theafro.org
So the time on my watch was 5:20 pm and I was done with the research my boss wanted me to carry out. I felt accomplished like my mission for that day was successfully done. I knew it was going to be an amazing weekend because my friend Cathy was coming over.
Cathy and I were on our way to Railways and because we were fully aware of the rainy season, we were walking really fast. Cathy would call it running because I could see she was struggling to keep up. I kept saying “Hurry up! We will miss the bus!” Oh My! The number of people at the bus stop was literally a math error and to make it worse it had already started to drizzle.
Well with a little hustling and pushing our way through the rabble we finally entered a bus and secured ourselves comfortable seats. We were set for the journey home!
“Driver, stop the Matatu! My phone is missing! PLEASE! Stop the bus!” a woman in the bus interrupted our conversation with a loud shout.
All heads turned to the woman. A short middle aged woman, dark in complexion, with a peculiar look in her eye. So we all stared blankly waiting for drama to unfold. The lady said that her phone is missing and that she was certain she was holding it before she got in the bus. But when she secured a seat, her Nokia 200 was missing.
Passengers, who by now had turned into investigators, freely offered her advice that included calling the phone and a full body search. Several attempts to call the phone were unsuccessful as the phone was off. No one wanted to tell the distressed lady that there were slim chances of getting her phone.
So she suggested, no, demanded the driver drives to the nearest police station so that everyone could be searched. Some people complained and argued but with the woman who had lost a valued possession being the loudest, eventually, we let her have her way.
On our way to Kitengela police station, the lady had calmed down. In fact, it’s as if the issue had been resolved as she dozed on her seat only to wake up and shout, “Driver, No! Stop the bus! We are supposed to go to the police station!”
At the police station, the woman quickly got out and we just watched from the window how she moved her lips and how her hands were being thrown into the air as she narrated to the police how her phone went missing.
The police ordered all the men out of the bus for a search. We thought a policewoman would come and search the ladies in the bus. Half an hour passed and the men streamed back to the bus. The police cleared the bus to go on to our destination.
“Is it safe to say women are not thieves?” I thought out aloud because we were not searched at all.
This incident just brought to the fore the changing tides in Kenya and indeed globally, in favor of women. Men are increasingly finding it harder to compete favorably with their female colleagues or classmates. In a bid to empower the girl child, the boy child was neglected, left to fend for himself. A thousand and one policies have been put in place to bring the girl child to the level of the boys, sooner or later; we will need to reverse the impact of these policies by enacting boy-child friendly policies.
