When I was aged about five or six, I was invited to a birthday party where one of the games we played was ‘pin the tail on the donkey’.
The profile of a donkey (minus its tail) had been drawn on a sheet of paper, and the object of the game was for the players to each get a chance to pin the donkey’s tail in the right anatomical position.
This sounds easy enough until you try it blindfolded, and after you’ve been spun around a few times to further disorient you. After the game was over, however, we soon forgot it after we were introduced to new party games.
The local government elections are coming up this year here in South Africa, and even though Kenyans seem to be on permanent election mode, in the next year or so there should actually be a general election.
As a result, I’ve been thinking about voters and the choices they make and how when those choices go wrong, we, the voters, tend to deny any and all responsibility.
Yet when we vote we are just like the blindfolded kids at the party who have been spun around a few times. We also seem very keen to move on to the next shiny new thing and forget all about the donkeys and where we pinned their tails until the next party comes along and we have to play the game again.
Over the years I’ve noticed as voters we don’t seem to make the connection between our voting blindly for a slate of people we could barely pick out in a crowd, and the decisions they then make supposedly on our behalf in the legislature.
I find this particularly irritating in Kenya where people tend to vote for presidential candidates and their briefcase political parties on tribal lines, without properly examining the candidates or their policies to see how they will affect the voters.
Kenyans from every party should form caucuses to select candidates that they can trust to send to the county and national legislature to bat for them.
It is time we got our act together and took back our power as voters.
One way we can do this is begin to organise ourselves now into caucuses. At grassroots level, each political party should have a group of men and women of integrity who will not be swayed by money, tribal affiliation or even just good looks, whose job is to vet the qualifications and intentions of those who would seek to represent the people at all levels.
Only once these organisations have selected suitable representative should the representative be put on the party’s slate of candidates for election.
However it should not end there. The caucus should then organise itself in such a way as to monitor the elected representative all the way through every vote and every decision. And if they stray from the path, then the caucus should organise a petition to recall and replace the representative.
As East African Law Society (EALS) president James Mwamu said in February 2014: “When the people of Kenya passed a new constitution, they were not only against a rogue executive, but also did not want a rogue legislature. MPs have run amok. They want to vilify everybody — governors, the judiciary and anybody — who dares to oppose them.”
If the electorate were to closely follow such a system, I can bet there would be fewer problems in the governance of our affairs and we might actually find representatives who help take us out of the morass.
This week, dear reader, the “G” in G-spot can stand for Governance.
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