Kenya’s Women Take Political Plunge : Africa: Female candidates win a record-high six seats in Parliament on such issues as sugar shortages, the high cost of education and a lack of women in key government posts.

This male-dominated country’s first multi-party elections since the 1960s attracted an unprecedented number of women to active politics.

Women won six places in the 200-seat Parliament, the most ever, and scores of seats on town and county councils in the elections Dec. 29.

That is a small percentage of the total, but for the first time, activist women have built a political base with their own issues.

“Kenyans, including women, came out of their cocoons,” said Muthoni Likimani, a grandmother, author and former Nairobi city councilor.

Particularly the women.

Most male candidates from the ruling Kenya African National Union stuck to lauding the government of President Daniel Arap Moi, while those in opposition tended to repeat accusations of corruption.

Women were much more concrete. They demanded an end to frequent shortages of sugar, flour and other essential commodities. They criticized the high cost of their children’s textbooks, heavy work loads for primary school students and frequent, unannounced increases in school fees.

Female candidates noted the lack of women in key government positions. They complained of the shortage of medicines at state clinics and of potable water in both urban and rural areas.

Maria Nzomo, a professor at the University of Nairobi’s Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies, said women should help make the laws because men have treated their concerns “in isolation from the broader national development programs.”

She heads the National Committee on the Status of Women, which wants 30% of the seats in Parliament reserved for women.

Only two women were in the last Parliament, and both were Moi’s candidates.

Under growing pressure from domestic unrest and Western donor nations to make democratic reforms, Moi lifted the legal ban on opposition groups in December, 1991.

Within weeks, three independent women’s groups were formed: the National Committee on the Status of Women, the League of Women Voters and Mothers in Action. Previously, women’s organizations were dominated by the wives and daughters of prominent men.

A record 19 women ran for Parliament and at least 130 contested seats in municipal and county elections.

Five of the new Parliament members are in the opposition. The one from Moi’s party has been given the traditional highest post a woman has held in government--assistant minister for culture and social services.

Women are expected to be subservient in Kenya, and beating a wife is widely considered no worse than spanking a child.

Election officials say women make up 51% of Kenya’s 25 million people and many of the 7.9 million registered voters, but they always have been underrepresented in government.

Only two women have served as permanent secretaries, the top civil service posts in ministries, and only three have been High Court judges. No woman has headed any of the dozens of state-controlled corporations or been a Cabinet minister.

Five women have served as ambassadors, but three were not career diplomats and owed their appointments to political connections. Of the other two, one was sent to the tiny Central African nation of Rwanda and the other was once denied promotion so she would not overtake her husband in the foreign service.

“In this country, good women are not supposed to be in politics,” said Wangari Maathai, who became the first African female professor at the University of Nairobi and now is an internationally known environmentalist. “A woman politician needs the skin of an elephant.”

Nzomo, at the diplomacy institute, issued a report about hardships inflicted on women candidates in the campaign. They included lack of support from male-dominated political parties, derogatory language by male competitors and, in one district, the rape of supporters of a woman running for Parliament. She won.

Women say the main reason for their interest in politics is the opening of educational opportunities to them in the last two decades.