If political party nominations are to be done through universal suffrage by secret ballot, which we have miserably tried, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) should do it with parties paying for the costs. I approached the IEBC with this proposal a few months ago, but I was turned down.
The reason I was given was that the IEBC was busy preparing for the General Election.
Further, the IEBC argued that as a court of last resort when disputes arise from elections, it couldn’t conduct party nominations. It was up to the parties to design methods of nomination they could handle.
It is now quite clear that this method of nomination, complicated by having to nominate five different candidates at the same time, is a nightmare to all political parties. So why perpetuate the fiction that parties can or should nominate their candidates through universal suffrage? I do not think so.
Let us learn something from other democracies. In Great Britain, neither the Labour Party nor the Conservative Party indulges in this extravagance of nominating their candidates at any level.
It is the responsibility of the party leadership and organs to identify the candidates and present them to the electorate for election.
The Labour Party, for example, evaluates the performance of the party representatives in all constituencies in readiness for elections. It is in constant touch with constituency party branches. There are constituencies the party regards as “safe” where any Labour Party candidate can win any election. In such constituencies, the party sends qualified and ‘electable’ party members. In marginal constituencies more work is done to ensure the candidate and the party are capable of winning the hearts and minds of the people.
In the US, they hold “primaries” where party members vote a preferred candidate to compete with candidates of other political parties in the main elections. But the US primaries are not all based on universal suffrage. There are states, like Iowa, where they use “caucuses”.
Further, not all states hold primaries at the same time. Primaries are scheduled sequentially from one state to the other to give the political parties and the candidates enough time and space to organise and manage the primaries effectively.
The rules of competition in Britain and the US are clear and leave little room for ambiguity. Further, traditions have been built over time, which make political competition civil and devoid of barbaric conflicts.
Even in younger democracies like Botswana, such barbaric behaviour that we see candidates and their supporters exhibiting in Kenya are conspicuous by their absence.
So what is wrong with us? Nothing really is wrong with us except that we have come up with naïve rules and procedures for political competition and by their very nature provide room for unnecessary conflict.
But let that statement not appear as letting some people off the hook; political violence is wrong and hooliganism must be stopped urgently. Unfortunately some state actors, through monetary gain, also indulge in it on behalf of candidates. But let us look into the process in detail. First, it is not fair to outsource the responsibility of identifying candidates for elections to the public; this is silly, unfair and unnecessarily cumbersome.
The electorate expects political parties to identify candidates in the least expensive and conflict-free process provided the candidates are qualified, competent, electable and meet objectives and policies of the party.
Second, the public should not be subjected to two general elections so as to elect one representative; both the logic and the arithmetic don’t add up. The first process of identification of a candidate should be purely a party affair in accordance with that party’s rules.
In Kenya, a party that chooses to do primaries through universal adult suffrage without having the capacity or technology to do so is simply setting itself up for problems.
If experience is anything we learn from, this should be it: never again. Third, let us not demonise other methods of choosing candidates as inferior to the universal suffrage route: romance and populism always aim higher than either the intellect or the real world can comprehend. So let us all take some deep breath and say, in unison, romance and populism are part of human behaviour, but we should not be doomed for a period of time to walk the political night with both.
Next time this is what we should do. We must accept a political party, in the first place, is a club. In Kenya we should be in a position to understand what this means and have a second look at the laws that govern political parties in this light.
There is a strong feeling something is rotten in the way our laws were hurriedly written and amended in Parliament. While we currently smell this rot we are not sure where the odour is coming from. Let us hope the Eleventh Parliament will come up with fresh noses to smell it, clean it and set up a better modus operandi for running future elections.
The writer is Minister for Medical Services and ODM Secretary General
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