Instead of fighting IEBC, give it teeth to curb campaign spending

In the next six months or so, many Kenyans expect to escape from the yoke of poverty, however temporarily, as the election fever heats up and various candidates offer themselves up for election or re-election.

That is why people, for a good reason, call an election year the season of plenty. The only difference among the potential voters is that while a small number expects to reap millions of shillings, the majority will have to be content with a few hundreds.

Of course the more cynical will say, with good reason, that we are heading towards a year in which politicians give back a little of what they stole from them in the past five years. Of course such generalised accusations can be unfair to the few clean ones, but one thing is patently clear: anybody unwilling to bribe voters has no hope of ever winning an election in Kenya.

In the past few months, I have been enjoying a standing joke with some young boda boda chaps in my village. One day, I jocularly told them that I intended to run as their MCA. Their immediate response was that I should signal my seriousness by giving them something small.

Now, considering I don’t know who my MCA is in the first place, I can only hope the word did not get back to him that he has yet another adversary to contend with. I can do with fewer enemies in my life.

Anyway, to go back to the issue at hand, is there any hope that we Kenyans shall ever elect people to political office because of their record in public service or their promise? Are we condemned forever to prefer those who can buy our votes with paltry sums of money or two-kilo packets of sugar? Will there ever be any change in the way we elect our leaders?

Well, miracles do happen and maybe one day we shall start voting in visionary leaders without expecting them to buy our loyalties. But this can only happen when our sense of civic duty ceases to be compromised by material want. Once this happens, we may turn up our noses at paltry inducements and vote in people willing to make us a lot less dependent on handouts.

The reason for this concern is that for the longest time, Kenyans have been voting for people who have managed to make money without using too many grey cells, people adept at making grand promises which they have no capacity, or intention, to fulfil.

RECOUP THEIR LOSSES

The first thing they do is to seek ways to recoup their losses, or to cushion themselves just in case they lose the next election. Can we blame them when they steal from us? Can we blame an MP who used millions to run for office if he or she fiddled with CDF accounts?

Can we blame a governor who was almost reduced to penury for dishing out lucrative contracts to a few in return for kickbacks?

The answer to this conundrum is simple: the ever-escalating campaign spending has to be curbed, one way or the other. Some sagacious people saw this need 14 years ago and mooted an Election Financing Bill, but MPs shot it down.

However, the Bill was eventually passed by Parliament in December 2013 and became law on January 10, 2014. Now we are entering another election year, and the worry is who will implement it. Can we realistically expect the beleaguered IEBC to do the job?

The main thrust of the law is to put a ceiling on how much a candidate — be it MCA, MP, governor, senator and even president — can spend in campaigns, the amount of donations they receive, and the source of such funds.

Such declarations will, for instance, ensure that drug runners and poachers do not buy the allegiance of our leaders, thus mortgaging our sovereignty. Instead of wasting too much time on inane arguments about the suitability of the IEBC, maybe we should be concentrating on empowering it to save our increasingly dysfunctional electoral system.

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Americans — at least the Republicans among them — seem to have spoken with a very loud voice: They want Donald Trump as their president. Well, we here in Kenya can only remind them of what one of their illustrious ambassadors, Johnnie Carson, told us just before our 2012 elections: Choices have consequences.

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