Long time readers of my columns in this newspaper will be aware that I consider practical politics in a country like Kenya to consist largely of creating appropriate “safety valves” to prevent the whole place from blowing up.
But since I have no way of knowing how many such “long time readers” there are and given that some may be unfamiliar with this phrase used in a political context, I will take the liberty of quoting at some length from a column I wrote back in 2017.
This is what I wrote:
“In an essay initially written perhaps in the late 1970s, the writer basically argued that the citizens of most African nations passionately believed in the Ghanaian founding father Kwame Nkrumah’s famous dictum: “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you.”
This created a tendency towards fierce and uncompromising political competition in newly independent African nations.
Adding fuel to this brutally competitive political culture, were ethnic or regional resentments; widespread poverty; enduring superstitions; limited economic opportunities; etc. This made for a uniquely combustible kind of politics which could blow up the whole country if not handled with consummate skill by the leaders of the day.”
I have been thinking about this perspective on Kenyan politics, since I read the bitter but well-articulated criticisms by media pundits, of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to uphold Dr William Ruto’s victory in the recent presidential election.
First, I would note that for many years Kenya managed just fine without a Supreme Court. But then after the 2008 post-election violence, it was evident that the country required some kind of “supreme arbiter” on presidential elections, which would guarantee stability however much its judgements may upset many Kenyans.
From such a perspective, the most important role that the Supreme Court can play is to serve as “the ultimate safety valve” which keeps in check the potential for violence routinely unleashed in Kenyan presidential elections.
Given time we may yet evolve into something very much like the Nordic countries that we so admire, where politics is really more about gradual shifts in policy, than a promise that winners will “wield power” in any transformational sense. And Kenyans would then stop viewing presidential elections as a gladiatorial contest on which hang issues of life and death.
But we are still very far from that.
And currently, of “the three arms of government”, the real checks and balances lie in that while the executive has the capacity to generate endless rivalries and hatreds, this is counterbalanced by two safety valve institutions: parliament and the judiciary.
And those who criticise the MPs as being a bunch of greedy self-serving crooks miss the greater point of what having all those 349 MPs sit in parliament really does for us.
This largely unconfessed aspect of why developing nations tend to have such large number of parliamentarians was most recently revealed in the political compromise that brought peace to South Sudan. To quote from an online article from back in 2021,
“South Sudan [in August] swore in hundreds of lawmakers to a newly created national parliament, a long-overdue condition of a fragile peace deal that ended civil war in the young country.
In all, 588 MPs -- a mix of delegates from the ruling party and former rebel factions who signed the truce -- took the oath of office at a ceremony in Juba presided over by the chief justice.
The creation of an inclusive national assembly was a key condition of the 2018 ceasefire that paused five years of bloodshed between government and rebel forces that left nearly 400,000 people dead…”
South Sudan has a population of just 12 million people, compared to Kenya’s roughly 55 million. By Kenyan political standards, the South Sudan parliament is a monstrous absurdity.
But, like ours, the South Sudan parliament serves as a safety valve into which the regional rivalries and hatreds are miraculously subsumed into clubby congeniality.
Differences can thus be thrashed out on the floor of parliament rather than in bloody urban street riots or rural countryside massacres.
