At the signing ceremony of the Azimio Coalition deal last Saturday, Kieni MP Kanini ‘Super Striker’ Kega, playing the role of MC, announced the parties putting pen to paper were nearing 30.
My heart wept for Kenya’s multiparty democracy. In an ideal situation, all those should have been just two or three ideologically grounded political parties, united by shared electoral desires. But the reason there were so many was because the current crop of politicians fears party primaries, especially in the large parties whose owners run the show like kings and queens.
To cushion themselves from pain and tears occasioned by badly conducted primaries, or simply to perish the thought they can lose in nominations in parties they don’t own, more and more aspirants are registering parties, where the ticket is direct and the pain is alien.
The net effect is that soon, every village will have its own political party.
In 1982, the late firebrand politicians Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and George Anyona attempted to register a new party, the Kenya African Socialist Alliance after having enough of the single party repression. I am sure that in their minds, they envisaged two or three more political organisations that would sustain the constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of association, as well as promote good governance and accountability.
Predictably, the Kanu regime nipped their dreams in the bud. But by 1991, it was no longer possible to suppress a nation pregnant for change, in a world experiencing the same labour pangs of new freedoms. The notorious Section 2A was repealed, paving way for the return of multiparty politics.
In the 1992 election, four main parties made a mark: Kanu, Ford Asili, Ford Kenya and DP. There were a few other parties such as Anyona’s Kenya Social Congress, but at that time, no one would have thought of 30 political parties springing up for the contest.
The default setting had generally been that President Moi’s Kanu would face a Ford juggernaut of liberation warriors, before Ford itself gave birth to several offspring later.
It turns out that the Second Liberation generation at least had some ideologies around which to rally, with proper shared agenda, enough to join just a few parties. To be fair, party primaries in 1992 hadn’t become the cutthroat thing it is today. At any rate, there were just three seats to fight for — President, MP and councilor.
Besides, coming from a tightly controlled mini-police state run by Kanu, there hadn’t cropped up enough people chasing these positions to make party primaries matters of life and death. The fear still lingered in the background, about the extent of newfound freedom of speech, and certain liberation giants were securing their party tickets without as much as a campaign. This is because first, the numbers seeking seats were not as many as today, and secondly, elective positions hadn’t become as lucrative as today.
If Jaramogi and Anyona in 1982 had believed in setting up a party or parties in which Kenyans would feel free to exercise free will, they clearly had no idea that a few decades later, the biggest challenge would be the relatively mundane matter of how to select candidates for the general elections. The first problem I have with Kenyan parties is that the five biggest parties are led by people from the five biggest tribes. The underlying issue is that to have a real political movement in this country, it must have one huge tribal foundation to begin.
From the outset, this effectively means that a tribal lord sitting at the apex of a political party is a key ingredient in Kenya’s politics. The trouble with that is that the fiefdoms thus created are fueled by absolute loyalty and unofficial gauges of support.
In that kind of environment, these leaders haven’t done enough to create avenues through which their parties can run credible and acceptable primaries. Often at election time, this loyalty test will lead to disqualifications and omissions of those whose “loyalty meters” don’t show agreeable readings.
Picture trying to capture a party ticket of a certain electoral unit, while your party leader or the real owners of your party, routinely land into the home of your opponents for dinner and close-up photo sessions. To be honest, political parties attempting to run primaries via universal suffrage try to do the actual work done by IEBC, without a fraction of the resources the state agency has. For all intents and purposes, nominations conducted by mass voting are general elections in all but name. Unfortunately, political parties are not empowered enough, by structures and equipment, to undertake such an exercise.
Therefore, the leaders of these parties have not done enough to demand that the electorate gives them a clean sweep, or the famous six-piece, at the ballot. I hold the view that Kenyan political parties must work on their ideological bases, their structures and their leaderships, to assure the nation that they run principled and fair organizations where everyone’s dream is valid, before asking the voting masses to give them a clean sweep.
Looking at all the parties now staking a claim before the elections, it seems like most sitting governors now have their own parties. God knows, by 2027, probably every sitting MP and senator will have one too.
They are united behind a joint presidential candidate, but I guarantee you that not many will go back to their perceived bases and openly campaign for that candidate. In fact, they are generally vouching for a joint candidate in a coalition because they don’t have their own, their leaders’ tiny enclaves in corners of this country not big enough to churn out national figures. None of them will say categorically that their fear of the sacred cows in big parties drives their communing in the small, safer ones. Yet the whole concept of every inch of this country having its own political party beats the logic behind the desire for vibrant political movements that the second liberation heroes intended.
However, for a start, the electorate must reject the clamour for a six-piece vote being pushed by big parties, until they show they have evolved enough to conduct proper primaries, thereby sealing that hole where everyone who feels disenfranchised runs to register a political party which gives him and his friends direct tickets!
If we want to save democracy and stop the proliferation of more parties than cattle in this nation, we have to start with reforming the big parties. Then bury several of the emerging briefcase ones.
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