The lesson from Gatundu South is that we have a choiceless democracy
What you need to know:
- Liberal systems operate by treating voters as pawns and have in-built mechanisms of perpetuating the attending choicelessness. Partly, this might be due to contending political players sharing fundamental principles that make choice difficult to exercise.
- That TNA could have the candidate they want, irrespective of whether he won credibly in party primaries or whether the people of Gatundu South would have elected him, is a live example of the contempt that elites have of you.
For long, Kenyan voters have prided themselves as consequential actors in the electoral process and democratic transformation of this country. Indeed, there are moments when voters have played a consequential role in determining who assumes State power or takes their place in the National Assembly.
But more times than not, voters’ verdict has been incidental, tangential or outright inconsequential to the electoral outcome.
This is the lesson of Gatundu South constituency. That it took TNA to drive home this lesson is the great irony of our time. It is the irony because of Jubilee Coalition’s preachy habit.
So preachy is the ruling coalition that it is often unable to recognise the log in its own eye.
But the Jubilee Coalition is not our problem. After all, they are not the only ones with this preachy habit. The alternative to Jubilee — Cord — has not acquitted itself credibly where representation politics is concerned.
Not only have we seen ODM falter when expected to hold credible party primaries but we also have been witness to their inability to hold elections for party offices.
Yet as a country, we still carry on the ritual of voting every electoral cycle. Not only have we witnessed the outright abuse of the electoral process, accompanied as it has always been by internal failures by the electoral bodies that exceeds the threshold of acceptable error, but also determination on the part of contenders in the electoral process to distort the process and gain unfair advantages out of it.
The reason for this is that in a liberal democratic process, elections are less about choice by ordinary people than about the choices the elite wish to make.
Liberal systems operate by treating voters as pawns and have in-built mechanisms of perpetuating the attending choicelessness. Partly, this might be due to contending political players sharing fundamental principles that make choice difficult to exercise.
In other circumstances, the economic underpinnings of the liberal system disempowers voters. It does so by subjecting them to extreme poverty, exploitation and ignorance that their grinding and exclusive focus on surviving the day deters them from prioritising the making of an informed choice.
Thus, we have repeatedly gone into elections guided by a false ethnic consciousness and ended up sacrificing the chance to seek alternative leadership.
VOTERS ARE IRRELEVANT
The instance of Gatundu South Constituency where the main challenger to the TNA candidate withdrew was a new high in Kenya in the context of a new constitutional dispensation.
The idea of contenders withdrawing when it is too late to have real competition was common in the pre-1992 electoral process. That it has now happened again shows a continuation of the historic contempt the ruling elite have for citizen voters.
It is Thandika Mkandawire who made the argument that captures the story I am telling. He described current liberal democratic processes as ‘choiceless democracies’ and went on to argue, in a piece published in the Daily Nation, that "In ‘African Democracy’ the Big Men Believe in Choosing Their Own Voters.”
The lesson here is simple: the voters are irrelevant to the electoral process in Kenya. That TNA could have the candidate they want, irrespective of whether he won credibly in party primaries or whether the people of Gatundu South would have elected him, is a live example of the contempt that elites have of you.
It is time this lesson sunk in our thick heads. It is a lesson that calls for a serious rethinking of the terms of our engagement with political elites.
It is a lesson that must unite voters across constituencies, religions, genders, etc, to demand that the hollowness of our electoral system is not about Cord or Jubilee but about our right to make a choice that is informed.
Godwin Murunga is senior research fellow, Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi
