Don't laugh - ODM and PDM might save us

You should always be suspicious when an African leader offers you his views on governance. Malawi’s Hastings Kamuzu Banda, to take one example, had this to say when he came under intense pressure to accept competitive politics in the early 1990s.

“There is no opposition in heaven. God Himself does not want opposition — that is why he chased Satan away. Why should Kamuzu have opposition?”

Coming from a man who stayed in power for 33 years and was infamous for cultivating a cult of personality in Malawi, his argument was obviously self-serving.

Yet the truth is that two decades after the introduction of multiparty politics, the views advanced by leaders such as Daniel Moi on the difficulties of implementing liberal democracy in Africa have been borne out. In countries such as Kenya, Cameroon and Zambia, voting patterns frequently follow predictable ethnic lines.

Yet despite the shortcomings of the multiparty system they dismissed, the likes of Moi and Banda offered no alternative prescriptions to competitive politics other than personal rule with themselves in power as long as they lived. This was a prescription for tyranny and economic decay.

Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, however, advanced a more attractive alternative. Mr Museveni’s view is that the main problem in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa is ethnic divisions.

Political competition is essentially ethnic competition. Parties are entities that exist to advance and protect ethnic interests. This makes holding multiparty elections in such an environment an exercise in futility. Mr Museveni offered an alternative.

He suggested that Africans should aim to have parties that have an element of cross-ethnic character by drawing their membership from, say, professional associations and other interest groups. This would mean that you have a party whose principal support base is made up of teachers, nurses, farmers or maybe unionists.

Such groups would, of course, be multi-ethnic. And this might set the stage for elections where issues, rather than the simple fact of one’s ethnic origin, would be the main dynamic.

It is a shame Mr Museveni did not take his own advice and has increasingly turned into a personification of the ‘presidents for life’ he criticised when he was a young revolutionary.

But it would do no harm if we stole his ideas and implemented them in Kenya where the problem of ethnic division is the key challenge to the survival of the nation.

The emergence of strong parties that can command support in many parts of the country would help to reduce the ethnic tensions that characterise elections here. ODM has already moved in the direction of cross-ethnic representation by having a leadership structure that is largely diverse.

The emergence of the Progressive Democratic Movement (PDM) is to be welcomed for similar reasons. It consciously seeks to position itself as a cross-ethnic movement that has a national character.

These large parties will be consolidated by the enactment of the proposed constitution. The system of political party financing will lead to the slow death of smaller parties because the bulk of funds will go to the parties that command the most votes at each election.

This will mean the bigger parties will be strengthened, and in years to come we might have politics dominated by two or three parties which will necessarily be multi-ethnic because of the delicate ethnic arithmetic in Kenya.