There was no way MPs were going to accept restraints on defections

The proposal was doomed from the start. Last week MPs shot down the clause contained in the report of the parliamentary select committee on electoral reforms banning post-nomination party defections. The rebellion was fully bipartisan.

There are good and bad reasons why the targeted clause got into trouble. In most cases party nomination exercises are totally shambolic affairs. Cases of major malpractice and outright rigging are the norm.

Even when a party is well-intentioned, the fact that most of these outfits lack capacity to carry out anything elaborate guarantees everything becomes a mess. Aspirants with deep pockets will make sure their supporters swamp the process so that they get the outcome they want. Those of a thuggish mind will ferry in their “Men in Black” for similar ends.

If parties could organise credible nominations that were fair, this party hopping business would not be the tragedy it has become. It was in this spirit that the select committee recommended that parties request the IEBC to carry out their nominations in future. Whatever one may think of the Commission, it has the institutional expertise to pull off a better job than disorganised party hacks can ever do.

Not everybody is keen on the IEBC carrying out their nominations, though. The reason is easy to see. Within some parties there is a culture of selling nomination certificates to the highest bidders, not necessarily those who win fairly. This, in turn, provokes floods of defections by aggrieved aspirants. It would be unfair not to allow them to defect by locking them into parties that have done injustice to them.

Running as an independent candidate is an option now allowed by Kenyan law, but not when you defect after a party fails to nominate you. However, let’s not forget this is a dicey option when the candidate cannot count on the support of a well-endowed party machine.

GENUINELY POPULAR

Unless one is genuinely popular in a big way, it becomes an uphill task competing against the propaganda and resources spewing from big party machines.

The top leaders of the main party formations – Jubilee and Cord – had welcomed the rule to outlaw defections for those who lose nominations, for obvious reasons. They deplore the disarray caused to their electoral endgames by these last-minute defections. Smaller parties look at things very differently.

Take the case of Kanu and Chama Cha Mashinani which are active in Rift Valley. They are strongly opposed to the clause precisely because they expect to reap a windfall from Jubilee’s nominations in the region. Other small regional parties like the Democratic Party that have refused to fold up into Jubilee opposed the clause for the same reason.

Kenya’s level of political development is such that voters elect individuals for the Presidency, not parties. Jubilee partisans will be voting for a pair called UhuRuto, not so much the newly-minted party. The pair can as well join a party called Nyundo or such other fancy name, and their core voters will follow.

Likewise, if Raila Odinga was to lose the ODM presidential nomination and defect to another party, his base would follow him there.

One reason why defections will continue being a rampant feature of our political life is because of the complete absence of a culture of accepting electoral defeat. Even when it is plain to everybody that a particular MCA or parliamentary or gubernatorial candidate has lost a nomination contest fair and square, their egos are such they will want to create a ruckus that they were rigged out, and bolt to another party. This is what has deformed democracy in Africa.

You don’t often see this problem in older democracies.

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So the Delamere family paid a fine of 49 cows to the family of the late Samson ole Sisina to appease a powerful Maasai ritual curse? Interesting.

The twists and turns of the saga of this colonial settler family over the decades never cease to tickle. It’s time somebody sat down and wrote a sequel of a different kind to White Mischief, a book that chronicled the murder mystery of another aristocrat called Lord Erroll who got entangled with a lady who subsequently married into the Delamere clan.

Happy Valley may be no more, but the fable continues. Only these days you can’t shoot natives for sport and expect to get away with it. Even if you make it through our corrupt justice system, something bizarre will get you!

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