The irony of our elections and a stillborn democracy

Even when the outcome of a contest is as predictable as the sun sets in the west, we still call it an election.

That is the question: Which Kenyan did not know that, in our country, even hand-picking as unctuous as has just happened in Homa Bay is known as an election — and a “democratic” one to boot?

No. That is not a commentary on Moses Kajwang'.

Indeed, the dashing young man who has just replaced his brother Otieno in the “august House” may bring back to the humourless, bone-dry and lacklustre legislature the sense of drama and excitement which was what was recently interred with Otieno’s bones.

To be quite sure, in the consequent by-election in Homa Bay, many constituents voted against young Moses. Nevertheless, it posed an instructive question that has never been resolved.

Which Kenyan did not know in advance that the victory would go to whoever the Orange Democratic Movement’s paramount chief had anointed?

Put another way, why do we call it an election even when the outcome is as predictable as the sun sets in the west?

If even the sun can stand still — to enable one ethnic community to capture Jericho (on Nairobi’s Uhuru Highway), where is the competition of ideas which is claimed to be the nub and core of our pretences at Western liberalism?

THE LUO

That, in a nutshell, is the irony of my ethnic people, the Luo. By their inimitably anarchic — and, indeed, unique — political outspokenness, the Luo are the touchstone of democracy in our country.

Yet, at the same time, they are also, collectively, the ethnic community most prone to hero-worship.

That is why, by and large, no Luo individual is ever likely to be elected president by all the ethnic communities together.

Luo outspokenness — often concomitant with anarchic violence — does succeed only in creating in the minds of ordinary members of other ethnic communities a permanent phobia for the Luo.

As we approach the middle of the 21st century, how do we resolve the conflict between, on the one hand, the tacit licensing of the ethnic paramount chief to unctuously and whimsically hand-pick “candidates” and impose them on the electorate and, on the other, the crying needs of multi-ethnic democracy nationwide?

Failure — both in praxis and in theory — to resolve this contradiction is why our democracy remains as stillborn as it was in 1963 and can so easily be exploited by nationally debilitating ethnic and individual interests.

It is what will continue to corrupt every nook and cranny of our national political homestead.

CORRUPT THE MASS

Where the contest for office is individual but success has been made to depend totally on the mass vote, the temptation must remain ineluctable for the individual to try to corrupt the mass, both mentally and materially (by constantly exploiting the narrowest ethnic prejudices of the mass while promising it the man in the moon).

That is why no ethnic Arab, Bajuni, Baniani, Digo, German, Goan, Iljemus, Italian, Kuria, Maasai, Pole, Scot, Somali, Teso, whatnot, will ever be Kenya’s president — namely, because neither he nor she can ever caress or bribe a number of human beings big enough to support his or her candidacy on any of our polling days.

This is such a glaringly hideous anti-democratic fact that our custodians of governance — such as the outfit of Nyachae Nyakwar Nyandusi (the great Charles) — must urgently revisit the Constitution to give that question a fitting answer once and for all; namely, to make it possible for a suitable Ogiek, Elmolo, Serb, Sioux or Welsh individual to be our ruler from time to time.

For, by calling ourselves democratic in a situation where individuals from only two or three ethnic communities can occupy State House, we are cheating both ourselves and our financiers in the struggle for social justice, and there is no truth in us.

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