Cost of bribing voters, winning polls up in Kenya, and someone has to pay

So Kenya’s Tenth Parliament just closed shop. The MPs caused uproar during their farewell by quickly passing a law that gave them nearly a Sh10 million golden handshake.

There was a huge uproar, and President Kibaki refused to sign up on the Bill.

As Kenyan parliaments come and go, perhaps none has been insulted as much as the 10th Parliament. Its members have been called all sorts of names, the most popular being MPigs. But was the 10th Parliament just a bunch of rogues and thugs, really?

The first thing is that the 10th Parliament came along at the time when social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, were coming of age in Kenya. This handed citizens a stick with which to beat them.

My sense is that Kenyans have always been as mad as hell at their MPs, and in the past, the best they could do was send the occasional angry Letter to the Editor in the papers.

Today, they have nearly 90 FM stations on which they can call and vent, and most of them who have something to say have a social media account where they are kings and queens.

What has changed, therefore, is that voters have the means to exact verbal revenge on their MPs.

However, the bigger problem with MPs is not the politicians, but the Kenyan political system. I was lucky to sit in on a presentation by a smart professor at the University of Nairobi, who knows a thing or two about Kenyan politics some time back, and he said the cost of bribing voters and winning elections in Kenya since 1997 had gone up by over 500 per cent!

This happened, first, for a good reason. In the one-party era, what you needed to do was to win the then ruling Kanu party nomination. The parliamentary election itself was a coronation because there was no competition.
From 1992, multiparty competition started, and all of a sudden, you had more parties than you could throw a hat at.

Thing is, the mere shift from one-party politics to multipartyism immediately more than doubled the cost of politics.

Secondly, Kenya’s politics is unique in East Africa in that it is the only one that pits old money against new money, and against idealists. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the race for governorship in various counties in the upcoming election.

You find a candidate from a landed old money family that has been swimming in riches since the 1960s, going up against an upstart who was a matatu owner, state bureaucrat, or NGO activist the other day.

For the NGO activist to beat old money, he has to go into debt, so he spends his term in Parliament paying election bills and bribing his voters in his corner.

This is a problem produced, in part, by how wealth is held in Kenya, not primarily by the greed of politicians.

The Internet and the opening of the airwaves, we have already noted, have handed voters the means to give their MPs and the government a tongue-lashing.

What it means for politicians is that they must compete on these platforms too, to make their case.

Some years ago, a candidate needed to put an advert in the Daily Nation and The Standard, and he was sorted. No other independent media existed.

Not anymore. You have to buy spots on at least four TV channels, two local FM stations in your region, and three or four Nairobi-based FM stations for your voters who work in the city.

And, of course, the Nation and Standard still have to get their share, but now there are new players like The Star to be taken care of.

Someone has to pay for this. The cost of democracy has to be passed on to somebody.

I see three options: One, Kenyans would have to accept that companies rent MPs and turn them into lobbyists for their causes.

Secondly, taxpayers will have to pay them the money needed to remain an “independent” MP serving the people.

Or, three, resort to party lists. Get rid of all the expensive primaries and nominations, and the parties just give you a list of who they have chosen to run as MP in your constituency or county as governor.

Otherwise, the idea of a Sh1.5 million-a-month MP is just a big lie, and we all know it.

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