It's not about Rosy

There was an animated discussion via my facebook on the underrepresentation of women in the new parliament, following the General Election of August 17.  The debate was stimulated by the fact that probably the one woman from the winning UNFGG who has come to Parliament off her own bat (not because of male spouses, siblings or parents), Rosy Senanayake, lost her seat in the preferential voting.  The number of women in this Parliament has decreased to eleven, from thirteen in the previous one.    The national lists of all contending parties are also devoid of significant numbers of women, and what caused the FB furore was the fact that some of us were advocating that  the Prime Minister (and other leaders, though that was not quite so explicit) uses the national list to increase women’s representation, and perhaps bring people like Rosy back into Parliament.

There are some people who think Rosy is arrogant – but by and large most people think she did a good job as an MP and during her 100 days, and that she stood by the UNP when others were leapfrogging between the two parties.  But really, the argument is not about Rosy.   The questions that are being raised are against the backdrop of ‘good governance’ principles.  First, is it against good governance to  bring in people who have not won the preference of the voters?  The President warned against doing this, and there are fears that others who were also rejected, and undesirable (the name of the former Minister of Higher Education keeps propping up!) might then creep in. But then, is it good governance to have 52% of the country’s population underrepresented in Parliament?  And shouldn’t the National List nominations be used to redress some of the imbalances that the electoral system might create?

Interestingly a newspaper carried a news item that was headlined No regrets: Rosy, reflecting some of the usual reactions to discrimination say in labour force participation, or political participation – if the women themselves don’t mind, if they prefer not to enter the work force, why should we?  I heard this argument yesterday while discussing a funding proposal on women’s empowerment with a leading NGO specializing in micro finance and small business development  and that was not the first time, neither will it be the last.  But if you read the article you will recognize that election campaigns are fought on a cutthroat, individualistic basis, and that parties themselves have no commitment to supporting women candidates get elected. 


Many of us signed up to a hurriedly drawn up petition to the Prime Minister asking him to consider bringing in more women via the national list.  As with many things,  we are too late.  We should have petitioned him and the other parties at the time of nominations. The Vote for Women campaign did not have a huge impact - there just weren't enough women to vote for!. The Elections Commissioner has declared the National Lists closed, so nothing can come of the petition even if it is read.  And that is unlikely.  As one of my facebook friends said, no one really cares.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Will change come through red gates?

Image
My former schoolmates are pre-ordering their copy of a coffee-table book entitled Through the Red Gates, a celebratory volume of 125 years of Ladies College, the school we attended on Flower Road, which celebrates this landmark event in 2025.   Some former schoolmates (and others) are also agonising at the possibility that the gates to the country’s governance might turn red with a Malimawa/NPP/Anura Kumara Dissanayake victory in the Presidential election next week.   The fear of a NPP/AKD victory takes several forms: it evokes the spectre of violence of the JVP (the main party in the NPP) forgetting that JVP are not the only perpetrators of terror. The political space, since 1 971 at least, has been seeped in violence - the JVP of the 1980s was particularly vicious, but s uccessive state regimes have unleashed state violence and given head to extra-judicial violent e lements that were equally virulent.   As Lionel Bopage has said in a recent interview , the violence of the JVP (and a
Read more

Some thoughts on the White Saviour Complex of development consultancies

Image
photo taken from  https://e11e99.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/identity-in-a-post-colonial-world/ I am sharing some thoughts that I picked  randomly from a relatively progressive Christian facebook page (Sojourners)that I follow, mainly to help me counter the rather misinformed opinions of my true believer Christian friends (brown not white).  The article is called , 6 HARMFUL CONSEQUENCES OF THE WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX, BY RYAN KUJA  and is so relevant to the northern development consultancy space that many of my (white) friends and colleagues occupy (and that I too sometimes venture into) that I thought to use it to write a blog post that I can share with that community.   R yan Kuja confesses that he was "never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls"  but admits that "the engine driving [him] was the white saviour complex..... The other Westerners [he] worked with believed [they] had it all pretty much figur
Read more

Year 2014: Buddhist era 2557-2558

Image
There was an interesting debate among colleagues that was triggered by the simple fact that I shared the official government calendar for 2014.  The Calendar has, as it has had in the previous year, and possibly many years prior to that,  the sub title -  Buddhist Era 2557-2558. This triggered a discussion on whether it was appropriate to have that on the calendar or not.  The argument against seemed to be based on it being seen as an imposition by the State of Buddhism, into areas that are perceived as secular and non-religious. [Though of course, as was pointed out,  the Gregorian Calendar is not really secular at all, based on the fact that it counts the years from the birth of Christ!] What was interesting was that we were having this debate at all.  Obviously, the current context has made us all ultra sensitive to certain issues, and the whole question of a state religion led some of us to be uncomfortable, others to be resentful (not overtly manifest in this conversation)
Read more