This wasn't a joke. A history of women being sidelined in imperial institutions has made some women justify manipulation as "women's power." It's not power but powerlessness. Yano was saying that she would remain powerless even as CJ.

Issa THREAD, priss. https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/nairobi/article/2001410667/i-will-assess-the-presidents-mood-before-engaging-him-yano-tells-panel

Under neoliberalism, this kind of soft power has been fronted as a way for disempowered people to exercise power. I've always hated it, but never had the words for what is wrong with it until I heard Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal explain it.#t=553.512651

Gopal called it "the high table model of how change gets done," when someone talks of meeting a decision maker in an informal event like dinner or golf and promising to "drop a word in his ear."

I can't count the number of times I've been told that that is "advocacy."

Initially, I tried to play that game. Attended all the things I could. But eventually, I realized that it's fruitless. First, you're usually not the only one trying to "drop a word" about varied things, and worse, you can't hold the person accountable since it's not official.

I also became aware of how unfair such "drop a word in his ear" meetings are. If you're not invited to the meeting, or you're stopped by the askari at the gate because you arrived on foot instead of a chauffer-driver prado, what are your chances of "dropping a word"?

And if you're a woman trying to drop a word in a man's ear, either directly or through his wife, that dropping a word is more likely going to be nibbling the ear, rather than dropping a word.

Thanks to Gopal, I gave up that lie of "lobbying."

Lobbying, dropping a word, networking.... whatever you call these informal ways of seeking insitutional service, is another word for one thing.

Corruption.

That's what the current scandals of David Cameron and Boris Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson tell us. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/23/cameron-and-greensill-a-timeline-of-events-in-the-lobbying-scandal

Now, imagine you are a CJ, on equal footing as the head of one of the three arms of government, that is the judiciary, and you have to negotiate with an equal arm of government by manipulation. That says alot about the excess of the executive through material resources.

That is why I have said that we need to understand the power of the civil service to undermine Kenyan democracy. It doesn't matter what legal powers the constitution gives us, if the president uses the civil service to materially undermine everyone else. https://africasacountry.com/2021/04/the-class-curse

The reason such whispers and mood inquiries become necessary is because the system is dysfunctional and the people have no power.

We need to fix that. Institutions need to work, we need social fairness and equal opportunities, so that whispering in ears beomes redundant. END