In case you were not aware of it, failure to observe International Women’s Day is ground for dismissal from The Feminist Movement.

So, here’s hoping you kept your membership card by celebrating it with all of the pomp and circumstance that it deserves. This year’s theme, depending on which website your search engine led you to, is either something about inclusion in the workplace or something about inclusion in the workplace.

This being an election year, it is important to keep a maniacal focus on the subject, thus the idea of a woman head of state has been drifting in and out of my consciousness.

As with all radical social change, the practice of feminism actually consists of a lot of patiently waiting around for developments to emerge.

Fifty years and some change after Independence, I figured that maybe Tanzania is ready to experiment with female leadership. And in honour of this vision of a matriarchal future, this article is revisiting some old and obvious points.

Female presidency has remained stubbornly elusive for the majority of the world, so this is hardly an African problem. Gender is the final frontier. How many women dare to go where depressingly few women have gone before? The lucky, the brave and the few.

While I do my best to appreciate the symbolic — and sometimes even real — gender empowerment effect of having a female supreme leader of all the land, at the end of the day it is too easy for that sort of thing to lead one trippingly down to the ghetto of tokenism.

Tokenism isn’t just tedious, it is dangerous. It allows the nature of an individual to be extended to a reflection of the character of a whole group, something that puts unconscionable pressure on that person whether their “issue” be race or gender or whatever.

Speaking of our African context, I am not entirely sure there is enough social infrastructure to support female leadership. For a woman to wield direct and personal power, without apology, is still very challenging for most of our communities to accept.

Of the three branches of government, only the legislature to the best of my knowledge has had a woman at the top of the pile. President, Chief Justice? Not yet. One-third impressive, indeed.

What about the other two-fifths, you ask? I forgot to mention the security forces, because the state holds the monopoly on the use of coercive and lethal power. And the civil service, because they hold the power of official documentation over our livelihoods.

We seem to be well-represented in these areas as well, government offices and police stations are never devoid of working women with the occasional mid-level boss representation and that’s as good as it gets.

If merit were enough to get a woman her just deserts, we would be living in an entirely different world — arguably half of our formal labour market would be made up of women.

More importantly, successful women in politics would be utterly unremarkable and allowed to be as diversely saintly or nefarious as their male colleagues.

This is important because it goes back to the tokenism issue. In the informal, rolling presidential hopeful show, the ruling party hasn’t even been able to offer a woman with the potential to vie.

How the women’s wing of CCM justifies its existence is a mystery. If at least a woman were running for office, whatever her chances of success, her treatment at the hands of the media and her experience of the campaign would be instructive.

Alas, it doesn’t look likely. Things being what they are, we have to punch through the glass ceiling using quotas.

On the one hand, a mechanism is needed to make the idea of proportional representation possible because otherwise government really would consist of a frightful cabal of grumpy old men.

On the other hand, special seats Members of Parliament are rarely treated with the same respect that their elected colleagues enjoy.

In there lies the distance that still needs to be travelled, and I don’t know what it says about us. And so the dream of a woman candidate is deferred, yet again, to be revived in another five years time. A luta, et cetera.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]