South Africans have just concluded elections and many Kenyan voters wonder how a country associated with chaos could have conducted incident-free polls in the post-apartheid era.
The secret behind peaceful elections in the rainbow nation is a proportional representation electoral system in which ideologies compete for multi-racial and diverse ethnic votes.
What Kenyan voters don’t know is that South African voters in their diversity know parties and their ideologies, not individual candidates and their fat pockets as is the norm here.
Voters in that country since independence 30 years ago choose parties to govern the country for five years without post-election interruptions by petitions and by-elections as is the case elsewhere, including Kenya.
Leaders for respective legislatures are picked by the electoral body from the party lists and posted to the country’s constituencies.
Here we pick entrepreneurs, villagers and clan people to represent us in the National Assembly where they deliberate parochial matters and trivialities.
Apart from being cost-effective, the system is free of voter bribery, violence and manipulation, the root cause of chaos in campaigns and during elections.
If only Kenya were keen on free, fair and credible elections, it could have achieved that after the international mediation in the 2007-08 post-election violence presided over by no lesser person than the former UN secretary general Koffi Annan.
More than 1,000 people perished, hundreds of thousands were displaced and property of unknown value was destroyed in the bloodiest violence known in Kenya's electoral history.
The Committee of Experts crafted out of the ashes of the PEV was assigned the task to, among other things, diagnose the root causes of recurring poll violence and prescribe remedies in the harmonised constitution drafts. Unfortunately, that did not happen and the problematic electoral statute remained intact.
The rain started beating us when the experts, oblivious to the destructive nature of parliamentarians, sought their views and input in the draft. Value could not be added to the draft by legislators who had a history of mutilating the Bomas Draft and the original constitution.
Composed of a team of legal scholars, the committee did not know that a constitution written in golden letters and bound in diamond is not worth the paper it is written on without factoring in a foolproof electoral system. Fourteen years after the promulgation of the so-called progressive and revolutionary constitution, electoral chaos recurs with unparalleled impunity.
The elephant in the room now and in the future is the gender parity introduced in the new constitution by the experts who failed to say how that was achievable under the current electoral system.
The constitution categorically states that the composition of the legislature should be balanced and that not more than two-thirds of the members should be of the same gender. Fourteen years later, gender parity is elusive and controversial not only in the legislature.
However, gender balance is possible if it is made mandatory in the party lists instead of attempting to legislate its implementation before the male-dominated parliament.
The proportional representation system is the solution to many of the country’s political hiccups.
Freelance journalist. [email protected]