Let’s emulate US political parties for better politics

The other day I came across two DVDs that were taped by a friend during the last American elections. They capture some of the events at the Democratic National Convention that year.

One has the speech by Bill Clinton as he nominated Barrack Obama and the second one is the speech by President Obama himself as he accepted the nomination.

Since Clinton has already been here and we are expecting Obama in just about a month’s time, I told myself ‘let me look at them’. I had seen them before but this time round they shed new light on the democratic project.

The two speeches – particularly Clinton’s – lay out very clearly what the fundamental differences are between the Democrats and the Republicans.

Simply put, while the Democrats emphasise inclusion of all, giving a chance to everyone, collective action, social security and so forth, the republicans are guided by the philosophy of individual initiative and a your-own-your-own mentality.

The ideologies that guide the two parties are clearly distinct from each other and there is no way one can confuse the two. Republicans are more conservative while the Democrats tend to be progressive.

The economic, social and cultural policies of the two parties are clearly different and sometimes opposed to each other. Here in Kenya we have a legion of political parties. Sometimes these come together to form coalitions or alliances of one kind or another.

FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES

Currently the two forces that are on opposing sides of our politics are the Cord and the Jubilee alliances. But let us look keenly and ask ourselves this question: apart from the different names and the different individuals, what are the fundamental differences in terms of philosophy and ideology that distinguish these alliances?

One will of course argue that the Americans have been at it for more than 200 years while our fragile democracy is only 51 years old and I agree. I however wonder whether we do have to reinvent the wheel. After all in matters of economy, development and even political structures have we not been copying some of what is in existence in those mature democracies?

Look at the model we have of representation and levels of government as we structured it when we promulgated our new Constitution. Is it not one that we borrowed from some governance structure that is already in existence somewhere around the world?

Our politics will have a semblance of maturity only when political parties will be about Kenyans and not about individual politicians. As it is now, each of the larger parties is about a tribal chief whose main following is his tribe and not Kenyans.

Fr Wamugunda is dean of students, University of Nairobi; [email protected]