Politics can be very depressing.
I will never understand why political parties ask their aspirants to pay nomination fees and await primaries, if they do not have the courage or the dignity to conduct them, or at the very least, give them a semblance of credibility. Neither will I ever understand why parties demand of IEBC standards and fairness levels they are unable to instill internally.
These past few weeks have confirmed that change is alien in all political movements in the country, and as I have predicted before, by the 2027 elections, the large parties will be dead, and in their place will be countless small ones.
Naturally, every aspirant for elective office five years from now will seek to have their own political party to save themselves from the whims and moods of big party owners. I have a problem with the so-called “direct ticket” as well as the consensus method of picking aspirants where there are more than one. This is because both methods deny the voter the chance to determine this at the primary and ultimately at the general election. To an extent, it also points to inherent insecurity among party leaders.
The best way to grow a party and rejuvenate it over time is to constantly allow voters to recalibrate it with new personnel holding fresh ideas. When party leaders try to stop the process by engineering consensus talks — ostensibly to avoid fallouts in primaries — they show their soft underbellies.
It is especially so when this is in their core bases, where allowing free will to prevail comes with relative safety. There are really just two main political parties in the land, when it comes to party primaries. These are ODM and UDA. The others either lacked the requisite support or did not have the aspirant numbers to warrant a mention as far as party primaries were concerned.
Ahead of these primaries within the major formations, aspirants who had paid nomination fees were scouring for information all over the place over the modalities, systems and certainty of their nomination processes.
The impression one got was that withholding information was part of the weapons deployed by the parties in keeping a tight leash on the process and ultimate results of the same. It is surprising that ever since the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1992, parties have not attempted to create the structures and systems necessary for conducting proper primaries.
To be fair, the resources required for such a venture would be monumental, so parties simply opt for a farce merely to meet the electoral requirements. The problem is that this farce has become a culture, and a long-term danger to multiparty democracy.
In 2017, many aspirants on the Jubilee Party ticket claimed a leading light in the party was practically nominating people from the comfort of his office via phone calls. The universal view was that the senior party official was attempting to place lackeys in elective positions so that he would have a smooth run for President five years later. But as a result of this alleged interference, many people leaving Jubilee in the current electoral cycle opted for small so-called village parties, as a safety net against lightning hitting them twice, so to speak.
The big man syndrome prevalent in Kenya’s parties means that on any given day, there are sacred cows for whom party primaries are intended to be a walkover. If we were to be fair, Deputy President William Ruto’s UDA vindicated itself brilliantly when several close allies of the DP were shown dust during their primaries last week.
By contrast, ODM threw direct tickets at all close Raila allies, saving them the big fall, if there could have been any.
At face value, you can tell what party can confidently preach change when it gets to the ballot. The question I ask myself all the time is: If the party leader is hugely popular in a certain area, why exactly do his close allies need a short cut to the ticket, rather than facing the electorate while riding on their closeness to the icon?
Surprisingly, while party leaders spare no effort to propel their yes men and women through the primaries, none seems to commit a fraction of the same energy on the one area where they should in fact push the numbers: gender parity.
After then Chief Justice David Maraga recommended the dissolution of Parliament in September 2020 for failure to meet constitutional gender requirements, we assumed that among other things, parties would go out of their way ahead of the 2022 elections to present party lists to the IEBC that met such targets.
I am interested in how parties will navigate this, and I don’t have to wait too long. On a score of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most ideal, I pick 2, for UDA and ODM, in judging their just-concluded primaries. Moving forward, the uncertainty, the absence of clear-cut structures and the obvious preference of certain people as candidates in certain areas mean multiparty democracy is regressing rather than growing.
Given that, I foresee the deaths of the two main formations before the 2027 elections. I find comfort in the fact that the mushrooming political parties, solely created to escape the slavery of big outfits, will offer wider choices in the short term. However, ultimately, on the graves of big parties will sprout better-run entities allowing free will. In the meantime, the quickest route available to the electorate is to pick more and more independent candidates, as a way of hastening the death of big parties where direct tickets and consensus have become the fad, rather than real primaries.
Five years is a very long time to sit waiting for a pre-determined process. I doubt many sane Kenyans with political ambitions will be committing their millions in campaigns, nomination fees and phantom appeal tribunals, where one-man-show big parties slay careers and humiliate aspirants.
Perhaps it is time to reexamine this whole concept of multiparty democracy and whether what we practice now is the model envisaged by the liberation heroes who fought for an expanded political space.
Most importantly, we need to have a conversation on why parties cannot practice the same simple honesty and credibility they demand of the chief electoral agency.
