Leadership Quote by Stephen Lewis

"It is always the village women who drive these things" is the kind of line that sounds like folksy praise until you notice how neatly it offloads responsibility. Lewis (a politician, and therefore a professional arranger of credit) isn’t describing women as background helpers; he’s naming them as the engine of change at the most local level, where politics stops being ideology and becomes logistics: feeding people, organizing care, keeping schools open, getting a neighbor to a clinic, shaming an official into showing up.

The intent is flattering but strategic. By elevating "village women", he appeals to an audience’s respect for grassroots competence while sidestepping the harder admission: formal institutions often fail first, and someone has to patch the holes. The subtext is a quiet indictment of the systems run by men in offices. If women are "always" driving, then the state is often coasting.

The phrasing matters. "Always" turns an observation into a rule, even a myth, and myths are politically useful: they can honor labor without paying it. "These things" is a convenient blur, bundling crises, development projects, community mobilization into a single vague category that doesn’t require naming what women are actually doing or what it costs them.

Contextually, the line fits a familiar development-and-governance narrative: when resources are scarce and authority is distant, women become the infrastructure. It works because it sounds like recognition while preserving the hierarchy that makes such heroism necessary.