Women need election resources

A NUMBER of intending woman candidates for the 2012 general election met in Port Moresby yesterday to participate in a one-week conference on the election and to familiarise themselves on the systems and processes of parliament.
All very well, except that we think this akin to putting the cart before the horse.
The strategy ought to be to get into parliament first, then learn the systems and processes, not the other way around as they seem to be doing.
And that means discussing the best strategies to get more women into parliament. What woman candidates need now more than training of any sort is resources for the election.
They need money, vehicles, loud hailers and such like. This is what women lack most at almost every election because, for most of them, such resources are locked in the hands of their husbands or fathers or brothers.
They need to have the majority of women voters be sensitised to appreciate their candidacy and the fact that women too can aspire to top political posts.
Many woman candidates today are those who have left the overbearing influence of men behind. They are either widows, divorcees or those who have never married.
Many others often come from political backgrounds where a member of the family has been involved in politics at one time or another.
The United Nations, the sponsor of the conference, has no mandate to go supporting individual woman candidates in any country’s  election. Its assistance, unfortunately, can only be extended to training and that is where it stops. Year after year, that is what it does – sponsor training and workshops. After elections, it gathers losing candidates to have post-mortem kind of sessions where woman candidates come together to discuss where they have gone wrong and to plot a course to do better in the next election.
Come election time, there are sessions of the sort underway this week.
The end result has always been disappointing.
Do not mistake our intent or position. This newspaper has always been supportive of women getting to have a say in decision-making. It has dedicated a lot of space to promoting the reserved seats concept which is now history and it is unlikely ever to be reconsidered so long as men control parliament.
Rather than training women who are most probably well-versed already in what needs to be said and done, it is time to plot new strategies.
Realise that the greatest asset women have in this country are women themselves. They number roughly about half of the adult population of voting age. If that number can be harnessed to support women candidates, there would be nothing stopping a greater number of women MPs entering parliament.
Hypothetically, male candidates would outdo each other and women candidates can have a field day.
At the same time that their number is their biggest asset, women themselves are also their own biggest liabilities. Quite apart from the fact of they being less educated, with little access to material wealth and such like, they are intensely jealous of each other. They fight like cats and dogs. You just have to be at one of the women’s conventions to understand the fierce rivalry that goes on.
A decent strategy to beat this kind of competition would be to sponsor only one candidate per electorate so that there are no competition between women candidates.
Network and share resources so that women candidates from neighbouring electorates should cross over into each other’s electorates to speak at rallies in support of the each other.
Most especially, women must fight for separate polling booths such as happened in Chimbu in the recent Kundiawa-Gembogl by-election.
Concerned organisations such as the United Nations that want to help ought to pour money into education, not of candidates but especially of the voters.
A longer term strategy is to start small.
Get women into lower levels of government first such as at council chambers and provincial assemblies. Promote woman into managerial positions and to become trade union chiefs.
People, both male and female, will respond favourably to women only if they have living proof of how they can operate as leaders. Papua New Guineans are doubting Thomases. If they see more women leaders at work at different levels of society, they will believe.