Election referees should be chosen by all the parties

Footballing England’s invention of something called “goalmouth technology” may remind one of the ugly shape of things in the political kidumbwedumbwe called elections. In Kenya, official vote theft has become so widespread that Wanjiku would warmly welcome such a gadget.

You will recall that, during the struggle for the present constitution, Wanjiku – perhaps the commonest female name among what is Kenya’s politically most self-conscious ethnic community – was your own very apt metaphor for the objective interests of all ordinary voters.

Soon it will be technologically possible for Wanjiku, sitting in a room even as far away as Sausalito, to witness everything you are doing even in the “privacy” of your bedroom right here in Governor Kidero’s “City in the Sun”. Indeed, the New Testament – your own “salvation” book – affirms that “now is” the time.

America’s own inimitable Martin Luther King would have affirmed that “now is the time” for Kenyans to ensure that their government is importing only such election machines as will really catch all the vote thieves who man (and woman) all the wicket gates through which we latch onto our government representatives at all levels.

Yet, in Kenya, that is exactly where the problem lies. In any country, how can the voter be sure that the government – an all-powerful but profoundly self-seeking party – will not resort and has never resorted to any hanky-panky in its management of any national poll in which it – the government – is one of the competitors?

The question might be put this other way: How can an accused be made a judge in his own case? How can the government be allowed to serve as the sole authority in appointing members of an institution before which the government itself might one day stand accused of, for instance, having rigged the polls?

APPOINTING REFEREES

In other words, how can the government – being one of the competitors – be also the sole authority for appointing the referees? In Kenya, all members of the elite know exactly on what side their bread is buttered. That is why all appointees of that kind know that the duty they have is not to the public but to whoever appointed them.

That, precisely, is the question that the so-called “independent” national election body skirts around like a crab every time. Among Kenya’s elite, how independent can a national body be when only one of the competitors has appointed that body? How can Wanjiku trust that the appointees will not feel beholden only to whoever appointed it?

To my mind, then, the most important problem is how to ensure a national election machine completely free of such corruptible influences as economic class, gender, profession, race, religion, sect and tribe.

For, as long as the constitution gives the government – the most self-interested and most powerful of all the competing parties – the sole responsibility for naming individuals into the electoral machine, that constitution authorises the government to rig itself into power through that body.

Kenya once tried to latch onto an electoral commission composed proportionately of all parliamentary parties. But I don’t know that such a system would reflect all our interests nationwide. Given the nationally acknowledged ethico-moral rot occasioned by the content and manner of our classroom drilling, how can we allow any party as profoundly self-interested as the government to be solely responsible for naming all of the country’s election referees?

Why do Kenyans entertain such a system in the face of the craze for ill-gotten wealth that the modern system of upbringing and education worldwide automatically implants into the minds of all human beings – given especially Kenya’s powerful individualist bent to grab as much as possible whenever one is in a position to do so?

That is why Kenyans increasingly find it impossible to trust that any government-appointed team will ever win the war on Kenya’s overwhelming corruption rate.

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