By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 30 July 2019)
Kenyans
barely had a chance to learn how great a leader Dr Joyce Laboso was, leave
alone to find out how far-reaching a role model she could have been if she had
lived longer than her 58 short years.
Sadly, she
passed on quietly at Nairobi Hospital last Monday, 29th July. Cancer was the
crook that stole her from us, just as it had recently taken two other
outstanding local leaders, Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore and Kibra MP Ken
Okoth.
But
unbeknownst to most Kenyans, Joyce had been fighting a lonely battle against the
cruel killer for many weeks. Being a woman who valued her privacy, few people
knew how this pioneering woman leader was fighting, first at the Royal Madden
Hospital in UK, then in India where she went for another three weeks of
treatment and finally back home where doctors had assured us that all she
required was bed rest and she would be fine.
That wasn’t
the case. But still, Dr Laboso has left a legacy of leadership that will stand
the test of time, even though she only become a public figure in 2008 after her
younger sister Lorna died in a plane crash. Lorna was the first female in the
Laboso family to be elected MP for Bomet.
Yet unlike
Lorna, Joyce had never aspired to be a politician. She was an academic, having
trained initially to be a teacher of French (one of the first Kenyans to take
up that career); then to go abroad (the first Kipsigis woman to do so) to the
UK to get a Masters degree from University of Reading followed by a PhD from
University of Hull. She then headed home to join the Egerton University
faculty, again teaching French.
Joyce had
been called by her sister’s political party, ODM to “fill the gap” in
Parliament left by Lorna. They claimed it would be a way of honoring her
sister’s memory if Joyce took her seat. So she ran and won the By-election by a
landslide. Only then did she decide she had to fulfill that calling. It would
be a matter of selfless service, to serve her people as effectively as she
could.
From then
on, Kenyans have seen an exemplary politician, a public servant who is in the
honest business of serving her constituents. When she won a second term in
Parliament, it was because she’d quickly proved herself to be a doer, not a
talker.
Then after
getting elected one of the three first Kenyan women elected governor, she
immediately simplified the protocol. For one thing, she turned down the
‘special seat’ her predecessor, Isaac Rutto had insisted he sit on (like a
throne) at every public occasion. She also refused the title ‘Your excellency’
and simply wished to be known as Madam Governor.
And perhaps
most emphatically, she refused to be flown everywhere in a chopper, unlike Mr.
Rutto who insisted he needed a helicopter to travel all over his constituency.
Joyce said she might be slower in showing up, but she promised her people
quicker services and far less waste. That way, she said, there would be more
resources available for the development of Bomet County.
It was
decisions like these that illustrated the qualitatively different sort of
leadership style that Dr Laboso was giving her people. “I have no time for
luxury,” she had said, alluding to Rutto’s throne. “I want to spend my energy
serving the locals,” which is exactly what she did up until the cancer’s grip
on her life was more than she could bear.
But even
before she got elected governor of Bomet, she had shown her metal as a national
leader. In 2013 she was elected by her fellow parliamentarians to be the first
female deputy Speaker of the National Assembly. Handling rowdy MPs wasn’t the
easiest job to do, but Joyce handled both genders with calm poise and
professionalism.
So, by the
time Joyce was elected Governor of Bomet, now on a Jubilee ticket, she had
proved that she was a different kind of leader, one who was principled,
purposeful and committed not to politics as usual but politics as public
service to the people.
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