Prime
Sharing the political carcass
What you need to know:
- In Kenya’s victor-hog-all politics, effectively half the country would be locked out of power at the national level in the next five years.
- Kenya, though, is a country where politicians like to eat fat toads, so reserving speakerships for the losing parties might not cut it.
- Perhaps a constitutional reform could provide for a Prime Minister elected by both Houses—but not from the party of the President.
The Kenya August 9 election has ended up in the Supreme Court, where former premier Raila Odinga of the Azimio la Umoja, who was runner-up, is challenging the declaration of Deputy President William Ruto as the victor.
The Day One voting went unusually well and was transparent in ways that kept East Africa and several other places on the continent and the world open-mouthed with wonder. Then, the old last-mile issues after the votes have left the polling stations set in, and now the judges will have to settle it once again.
However, even as Kenyans continue to rage over the election outcome, outside the poll dispute is a novelty. Although Ruto is deputy president, following his fall-out with President Uhuru Kenyatta and the latter’s alliance and backing of Odinga, his Kenya Kwanza went into the election as the opposition. If it were to turn out that Kenya Kwanza fiddled the vote, it would easily be the first time the opposition stole the presidency. That is one reason several outsiders think it is unlikely; in Africa, the opposition doesn’t get to rig the vote (unless the exiting incumbent does it for them as Joseph Kabila did for Félix Tshisekedi in DR Congo in 2019); it is the one that is robbed.
Others, however, see some hope in it, arguing that rigging is righteous when an oppressed opposition uses it to take power from a dominant abusive ruling party.
This picture of Kenya as an equal-vote-stealing opportunity country is as fascinating as that of it as an over-the-top transparent Day One voting nation.
Kenya, though, wasn’t the first African nation to hold such a transparent vote. The honour belongs to a country whose politics is often as messy as Kenya’s – Nigeria.
The Nigerian federal state of Osun held an election for governor on July 16. The candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (UPC) of President Muhammadu Buhari was trounced by the flagbearer of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
The popular view in sections of the Nigerian media was that APC was unable to rig because the tally was done electronically and live. All parties, including civil society, foreign embassies, and others, wanted their interfaces built directly into the election commission servers so they could monitor live and copy to their own servers, going a step further than Kenya did.
But old habits die hard, with allegations of widespread vote buying. In a first, anti-corruption officials were deployed to polling stations, and mobile phones were banned in the booth. Apparently, it is not uncommon for a M-Pesa payment to land on a voter’s phone after she has picked up the ballot paper and is about to tick her candidate, leading her to make a surprise last-minute change of heart.
Despite missteps, these election transparency reforms have made for very close votes in countries like Nigeria and Kenya. It is both a good and bad thing.
Consider what happens in an election where the winner gets 88 per cent of the vote, the runner-up 10 per cent, and the rest share two per cent. Where the winner takes all, the losers who will be locked out for the next five years are just 12 per cent.
Ruto was declared the winner with 50.49 per cent of the vote, and Raila took in 48.8 per cent. In Kenya’s victor-hog-all politics, effectively half the country would be locked out of power at the national level in the next five years.
The combination of the constitution and court-driven reforms electoral reforms in Kenya, in many ways, has succeeded to a level where they are becoming politically untenable. The solution to this has been “handshake” and “nusu mkate” (half a loaf of bread) political deals and national unity government arrangements made in the shadow of post-election crises.
It is a start, but a poor one. The changes need to be entrenched in the constitution and election ritual. There are some basic models around. In Rwanda, by law, the speakers of the National Assembly and Senate cannot be from the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front and its affiliate parties. They are elected from other parties with members in the house. The discussion of which Kenya Kwanza luminary will become Senate Speaker that we are seeing wouldn’t arise. Even the One Kenya Alliance wouldn’t get it.
Kenya, though, is a country where politicians like to eat fat toads, so reserving speakerships for the losing parties might not cut it.
A bigger job would have to come into play. Some ideas emerged from the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), but its champions overplayed their hand, and the Court of Appeal impaled it on a stake.
Perhaps a constitutional reform could provide for a Prime Minister elected by both houses, but he or she cannot be from the party of the president. Without that, computers tallying votes in Kenya will continue to be weird, and the Supreme Court will have to contend with lorryfuls of election petition papers for a long time to come.
