How to implement two-thirds gender rule in parliament

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

18 September 2022

The question of the two-thirds gender rule in parliament was re-ignited by President William Ruto during his inauguration address to the nation. I have expressed my views about it in past articles of this column. In short, I think it is unnecessary since parliament is properly constituted as required by article 97 and 98 of the constitution.

Nevertheless, if this rule is implemented by the popular method of appointing additional women in order to tip the balance, how many appointees will be required? The lazy way to work it out would be as follows: The national assemble, for example, has 349 members (290 from constituencies, 47 from counties and 12 nominated). One third of this number is 116.33. Currently, there are 82 female members (47 from counties, 26 from constituencies and 6 nominated). 116.33 minus 82 is equal to 34.33; therefore, we need 35 additional female nominated members.

But, let us now work backwards and see if the rule has been obeyed. Adding 35 members to the current 349 brings the total to 384. Next, we add 35 women to the existing 82 to get 117. Finally, we divide 117 by 384 and this comes to 0.305. That is, the women are still less than one-third of the membership; in other words, the men are more than two-thirds!

What’s going on? The mistake is that we have done the calculation of additional appointees using the total membership, yet this is the value we are looking for! The correct approach is to start with the men since their number will not change.

How many men are there currently? This is simply 349 minus the 82 women already in the House. The answer is 267. Next, we recognise that, by the two-thirds rule, this number (267) should not exceed two-thirds of the total membership.

Thus, we ask: if 267 is two-thirds of the whole, what should be the full membership? To get the answer, we divide 267 by two-thirds; in other words, we multiply 267 by 1.5. The answer is 400.5. This, then, means that there should be a total of 400.5 – 267 = 133.5 women in the national assembly. This rounds up to 134.

Since we already have 82 women, we should then nominate an additional 52 to satisfy the two-thirds rule. By similar calculation, it turns out that we shall need to add one more female senator in the Senate. I hope the relevant authorities don’t go the lazy way if this comes to pass.