The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has said that 89 political parties have not complied with nomination rules. The non-compliant parties include Jubilee, ODM and UDA.
Consequently the parties cannot be issued with a certificate of compliance to contest the 2022 elections.
The non-compliance issues appear to be relatively minor: clear guidelines on how to identify aspirants and prepare the party list; lack of a code of conduct for malpractice; missing internal dispute resolution mechanisms; and fee waiver for special interest groups.
Most parties should be able to resolve their issues within two weeks so that they can submit their lists to the IEBC in April and conduct their primaries.
However it is not financially or logistically possible to conduct a completely democratic party nomination process. That would require the votes of all constituents supporting a particular party in a particular constituency. Therefore we can only expect that nominations to be as democratic as possible.
Globally, political party nominations to select candidates are always being influenced by headquarters and are to some extent improvised.
So, yes, we should aspire to a genuinely open and transparent party nomination process but we also need to be realistic about what is achievable.
Quote of the day: "You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you."
Leon Trotsky
The revolutionary was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party on November 12, 1927
