Ideally, it should be ideologies or philosophies that inform whether various political parties or coalitions have a common ground for them to come together.
The parties should, or must, compare their respective political philosophies before coming to a common ground and working together. This is what happens in mature democracies.
But in the context of Kenyan politics, I don’t think our politics is mature enough so we can say ideology and principles are the basis for the formation of our political parties and coalitions.
Looking at the constitutions and manifestos of various parties, you can see they are rather similar in what they promote and promise the electorate. They make promises, some promise heaven, but when it comes down to implementation, they don’t achieve much.
Also, in the Kenyan scenario, parties are based more on personalities than philosophies.
As a country, we are yet to mature to the level that the electorate will be looking at parties' philosophies and insist on principles.
We're not mature enough to want to hold our politicians accountable to the philosophies they espouse when forming parties and campaigning.
We are seeing a lot of realignments now and more are coming because the 2020 General Election is just about two years away.
I don’t think we can ascribe any common philosophy to the alignments and realignments we are seeing. The alignments are also very much based on personality rather than promoting a philosophy.
So, I think we still have a long way to go before we begin to see parties or coalitions formed on the basis of philosophies or ideologies.
The reason why Jubilee and Kanu merged is not clear because we have not seen any debate or discussion in the public sphere as to what common philosophy brought them together. But certainly, it has something to do with 2022. No philosophy or ideology is binding them.
The former Law Society of Kenya chairman spoke to the Star
