Party-hopping pulls Kenyans backwards into ethnic disunity

President Uhuru Kenyatta (front, left), his Deputy William Ruto (front, right) and officials of political parties that will merge to form the Jubilee Party at State House in Nairobi on August 9, 2016. PHOTO | JEFF ANGOTE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Moving to another party happens especially whenever a candidate fails to be nominated by his or her party for a civic or parliamentary seat.
  • Europe’s own Slavs have recently exemplified the tragedies which tribal small-mindedness can occasion to humankind.
  • It is redeeming to hear that Jubilee and Cord are now united against party-hopping in the run-up to the next parliamentary and civic polls.

If an ideology is a set of social ideals, usually for the future, what can a Martian observer say is the ideological difference between Kenya’s ruling Jubilee and opposition Cord super-parties?

That is the question every Kenyan voter should be asking whenever — as happens just before every General Election — there is a massive switching of parties.

The phenomenon of moving to another party happens especially whenever a candidate fails to be nominated by his or her party for a civic or parliamentary seat. The question is thus ineluctable. If the parties are really ideological unions, how on earth can pre-election party-hopping be so easy as to become the characteristic Kenya’s politics?

I can hardly mean that it should be banned by statute. Yet the answer to my question is peanuts. It is that none of Kenya’s political parties — and there are a myriad — is an ideological movement. Indeed, in terms of social thought, all our umpteen political parties are as identical as Tweedledum and Tweedledee of European fiction.

The question is thus inevitable. If all the candidates carry the same ideological price-tag, by what criterion do Kenyans vote? In ideological terms, what exactly is the choice between Uhuru Kenyatta, Musalia Mudavadi, Kalonzo Musyoka, Raila Odinga, William Ruto and Moses Wetang’ula for the presidential seat?

In terms of ideology, you have no real choice as a voter because all these candidates preach practically the same Western European liberal message – except that they do it in much poorer and much vaguer language.

In Kenya and other former Western European colonies, then, we do not even know how to pretend about it. We vote not for ideas, not for an ideology, but only for our tribesman or woman.

It is a marvellous manifestation of how backward we remain in terms of social thought. What is the price of our classroom and library education when, in Kenya’s presidential elections, even our academically most highly certificated brothers and sisters rush to vote only for candidates from their own tribes?

TRIBAL HISTORY

What exactly have members of our ruling class learned from the tribal history of the same Europe that this whole class worships, a land mass notorious for tribal skirmishing throughout its history, a continent which has recently plunged mankind as a whole into two extremely devastating world wars as a result of tribe-rooted economic rivalries?

Europe’s own Slavs have recently exemplified the tragedies which tribal small-mindedness can occasion to humankind. That continent has scored certain goals in science and technology. This is what we, here, should emulate, not the ethnic puny-mindedness in which that continent has nearly plunged mankind into an Armageddon.

So far, then, our parties are nothing but ethnic vehicles through which individuals seek to ride roughshod into national or local domination bodies. That is why I would not claim that our massive party switching phenomena common in pre-election times are a manifestation of democracy.

That is why it is redeeming to hear, as we did this week, that Jubilee and Cord are now united against that practice in the run-up to the next parliamentary and civic polls.

First, such sudden switching of sides shows that none of our political parties represents any social ideal of the kind that once inspired our founding fathers.

Party-hopping is perpetrated especially by those who fail to be nominated for election into parliamentary and civic seats. The parties themselves encourage that phenomenon.

Such party leaders have no idea whatsoever that, in that way, they pull Kenyans powerfully backwards in the direction of ethnic small-mindedness and disunity.