Kenyan electoral reforms empower electorate

Power is about to be handed to the people of Kenya. They have been exploited by power hungry dictators since the country became independent in 1963. Jomo Kenyatta’s number one preoccupation was to change the Constitution to make himself lawfully a dictator who controlled the Executive, the Judiciary, the Legislature and the Media. When Daniel arap Moi took over, he systematically changed the law to make himself an even worse despot than Jomo.

He made Kenya a one party state with himself as the undisputed leader of that party. The dictatorial regimes of Kenyatta and Moi were made possible through the legitimization of sham elections which put the two leaders in office with the consequences of untold economic, political and social miseries to the people of Kenya. The situation is about to change as the country begins to think about reforms. One of the most important of these reforms will be the electoral reforms. It therefore is extremely important for the leaders to examine what have been the major weaknesses of Kenya’s electoral system. For Kenya to have free and fair elections in future, power must be handed to the people to enable them to truthfully participate in the complete formulation of an electoral system and also actively participate in the entire electoral process.

Three important steps have to be taken to make sure the country succeeds to make those achievements. The first one is a thorough examination of the Constitution to make sure it establishes a truly pluralistic culture that allows the existence of true multiparty democracy in the country. The second step is to examine the electoral commission to make sure that both its form and structure are in keeping with the new democratic Kenya that believes in handing the power to the people. The third step is to make sure during the future elections there will proper accessibility of all the candidates to voters and all the voters to the candidates. Voters must also have the accessibility to all the relevant information about the entire electoral process including campaigns, manifestos and all the relevant activities of the Electoral Commission.

There can be no hope of electoral reforms in Kenya unless a number of changes are made to the current Constitution. The first change has already been made by the establishment of the IIEC made up of credible people who were appointed in the most transparent manner through Section 41 of the Constitution.Nzamba Kitonga must make sure the draft constitution he is preparing for Mutula Kilonzo to submit to Parliament will make the provisions in Section 41A of the Constitution a permanent form. Before that part of the Constitution was changed, it gave the powers to appoint members of the Electoral Commission to the President and the President alone.

Memories cannot be so short as to forget the manner in which Mwai Kibaki abused this part of the Constitution, just before the last elections when he appointed people with the sole responsibility of rigging the elections in his favour. Today the country is eagerly waiting to see how the IIEC implements Section 41A which gives the new team the responsibility to reform, the electoral process and manage elections in such a manner as to institutionalize free and fair elections in Kenya. The new team will probably find it a bit difficult to do so without controlling the primary elections which are still conducted by political parties controlled by individual politicians with dictatorial tendencies of running those parties as personal properties. The new team may have to look at the Political Parties Act of 2007 with a view of recommending changes that will give the IIEC the responsibility of conducting regular party elections as well as party nominations before any general elections of by-elections.

Elections cannot be free and fair when nominations are conducted in such a tribalistic or even clannish manner. After all Section 14 of the Political Parties Act prohibits the Registrar of political parties from registering any political party which is founded on an ethnic , tribal, gender , regional , linguistic , corporatist, professional or religious basis or which seek to engage in propaganda based on any of these matters. The new team, which the country has yet to know how it operates, will find it extremely difficult to perform its duties effectively with political parties they cannot control. One of its duties is to conduct and supervise elections efficiently. According to Section 41A (f) the new team is expected to develop a modern system for the collection, collation, transmission and tallying electoral data. This can probably be done most effectively by making sure voting in future will be done electronically. As a matter of fact electronic voting should be introduced in the country in all political parties during the nomination stage of elections.

The third challenge of the new team is that of accessibility. One of the greatest weaknesses of past elections was the fact that voters elected leaders purely on tribal loyalties.The call for majiboism made Kenyans think of themselves as members of their own tribes rather than their nation. The challenge is to make political parties come up with original party manifestos that create meaningful debate during the election campaigns. As things are today, Kenyans vote for people simply because they come from the same villages. The level of party and electoral democracy will rise quite considerably when both leaders and voters begin to think about issues, rather than personalities, during elections.Until today, for example, people think of PNU as Kibaki's personal party instead of a party of the people.It is the fight to personalize the ownership of ODM that created an unbridgeable gap between Raila and Kalonzo Musyoka.

The time for campaigns through hype and hoopla should now be replaced by a thorough examination of party policies and individual leader’s ability to meaningfully interpret those policies before an inquisitive audience. Platform sharing during both the primary and national elections should be the IIECs number one agenda in reforming eletions as an essential prerequisite to get nominated as a party candidate and finally be elected as a Parliamentarian. Kenyans must have followed the last American election intimately because of Barrack Obama. By now they know how the new American President had to go through a very rigorous Democratic Party nomination through very well organized Primary Elections. It is time Kenya introduced countrywide Primary Elections to be organized by the IIEC. The second most important lesson for Kenyans from the last American elections is the manner in which the new President works very closely with his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, after going through a period of bitter rivalry for party nomination. This is the kind of mature politics Kenyans should be planning for through electoral reforms.

May be the forth step that the new team needs to consider seriously is to establish a very effective interactive website that will cater for both the public and the entire Fourth Estate.The manner in which the media covered the 2007 elections showed a number of professional weaknesses which the IIEC can help to eliminate through media workshops before, during and after elections . In the next election the IIEC should organize regular press conferences to inform journalists and Kenyans everything there is to know about the entire electoral process.And when journalists are given such opportunities they should master the ethics of covering election in a free and fair manner. The IIEC should also organize the platform sharing between both Presidential and Parliamentary candidates and make Kenyans follow the debate through television and serious interactive town-hall debates rather than through public rallies which encourage hype and hoopla and the game of strategy rather than the substance of elections. The ball is now in IIEC’s court.