logo
ADVERTISEMENT

MUGA: Constitutional change is inevitable

Are we really going to be indefinitely held hostage by the seeming inability of our election officials to conduct a tally of presidential votes that satisfies all sides?

image
by The Star

Columnists03 October 2023 - 20:02
ADVERTISEMENT

In Summary


  • Memories of 2007-08 PEV can never be far from the minds of those who understand that it revealed just how many young Kenyans feel they have nothing to lose.
  • Of all the potential triggers of election-related violence, none is more potent than the claim that the tallying of the presidential vote was subject to some kind of fraud.

I am lucky enough to have grown up at a time when jobs were not that hard to get here in Kenya. The only difference lay in that if you had a college education, then you could get a good job. And if you only managed some kind of elementary education then you would have to accept whatever you could get.

Of course, a different reality applies now. Nowadays, many university graduates roast maize or cassava on the sides of the road. Or work on construction sites as casual labourers.

Jobs, in general, are very hard to find.

All the same, it was a shock to me, as to many others of my generation, to see the enormous crowd of young Kenyans who turned up at Embakasi for the Kenya Defence Force recruitment a few weeks ago.

Though the crowd was estimated to be just about 7,000 people, they presented a spectacle that spoke eloquently of the failure by both government and private sector to create much-needed jobs.

But there was yet another dimension to the sight of this large crowd. Anyone who witnessed the 2007 post-election violence is very likely to have developed a certain unease at the sight of a Kenyan crowd that is plainly far too large to be easily controlled by the police, if that crowd decided to go on the rampage.  

The memories of that tragedy can never be far from the minds of those who understand that it revealed just how many young Kenyans feel they have nothing to lose. And how easy it is to persuade them that their plight is the result of the failure of an illegitimate government to deliver on their rational expectations.

And of all the potential triggers of such election-related violence, none is more potent than the claim that the tallying of the presidential vote was subject to some kind of fraud.

In all the presidential elections since 2007, the country has been divided down the middle with two top presidential candidates each receiving support from close to half the country. And going into these elections, each side was certain that victory would be theirs “very early in the morning”, as Kenyans say.

And so if there is one thing that can take the country down the path to civilisational collapse, it is this simmering conviction that the final results for the presidential vote, as announced by the election officials, in some way do not represent the reality of votes cast. In short, in any Kenyan presidential election, there is likely to be one side or another declaring in outrage that “Our votes were stolen.”.

Currently, there are many who associate such claims of “stolen votes” with the opposition leader, and former Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, as he has now made that claim repeatedly following the last four consecutive elections.

But this claim actually preceded his candidature for the presidency. Other prominent politicians who ran for president earlier and lost – from Kenneth Matiba to Mwai Kibaki to Raila’s father, Jaramogi Odinga – were no less loud in proclaiming electoral fraud, as the real reason why they lost to Daniel Moi in the 1990s.

And think back on the loud boasts during the campaigns by Raila’s partisans that they had control of the “deep state” and the outcome of that election was already predetermined in their favour.

Under those circumstances, if it was Dr William Ruto who had lost in last year’s presidential election, would he have taken this lying down? Or would we not have heard much the same claims of stolen votes coming from his supporters?

So here is the question: are we really going to be indefinitely held hostage by the seeming inability of our election officials to conduct a tally of presidential votes that satisfies all sides?

And if this one thing – the tallying of the presidential vote – is what permanently holds the threat of national unravelling over our heads, is it not time that we dispensed of it altogether and reverted to the Westminster parliamentary system that we had in the early years of Independence?

ADVERTISEMENT

logo© The Star 2024. All rights reserved