When politics becomes performance, citizens pay

She squeezes into school uniforms, parades minor schoolgirls across social media, dances for TikTok clout and waves packs of sanitary pads around as though she is single-handedly rescuing Kenyan women from poverty. The internet calls her out over concerns about violating children’s privacy and reducing systemic gender issues to a circus for optics.

Yet she remains unfazed, plastering children across social media and dancing with them in uniform because, in the patronising minds of our political elite, a Woman Representative’s job begins and ends with handing out hygiene products and performing for cameras.