Jubilee mass party to fortify inclusive development

"Dictatorships are as old as the hills. The fascinating innovation of our time is the idea of a mass party”, wrote Jomo Kenyatta in an opinion piece published by the Daily Nation in 1964. Kenyatta was fascinated by the rise of mass politics, generally associated with the emergence of mass society, which saw the inclusion of previously marginalised groups such as women and former colonial subjects in the political process as voters.

Like other intellectual architects of modern Africa such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, Kenya’s founding President embraced the mass party framework as an antidote to ethnic polarisation and disunity and a solution to “three enemies of the people”: ignorance, poverty and disease.

In many ways, the launch of Jubilee Party on September 10, 2016 signalled the return of mass party politics to make Africa’s democracies safe for development. This follows the realisation that closely contested elections are a mortal threat to the security and future of Africa’s fragile democracies.

Recently, even though Zambia’s newly-elected President Edgar Lungu won 50.35 pc of the vote, the country has witnessed post-election violence and instability after rival Hakainde Hichilema, who garnered 47.67 pc of the vote, disputed the victory.

Zambia’s tragedy has a familiar echo in Kenya’s 2007/8 post-election violence after opposition leader Raila Odinga, who scored 44 pc in the 2007 presidential poll, alleged rigging and challenged Mwai Kibaki’s narrow victory (47 pc).

In this context, President Uhuru Kenyatta is re-engineering the mass party politics of the 1960s as the vehicle of his development approach to realise democracy and inclusive development.

LONG-TERM PLANNING

After visits to Southeast Asian democracies, the Jubilee elite realised that stability and inclusion hold the key to long-term planning, sustainability and implementation of government policies. China owes its rise to its superpower status to the stability, certainty and predictability of the system, giving it capacity for long-term planning and strategising.

In this regard, late last year, Uhuru Kenyatta’s strategists presented him with four scenarios, which are ideologically defining development across the world.

The first is the “authoritarianism-without-development” model that characterised the one-party era in Africa; the second is the “development-with-authoritarian” model popular among the Asian Tigers and emulated in some African countries; the third is “democracy-without-development” that characterised India during the Cold War; and the last is the “democracy-with-development” model largely identified with key Western democracies.

Kenyatta settled for the development-with-democracy model. This scenario is now refining party politics and underpins his 2017 re-election strategy.

This is what Jubilee pundits are touting as Kenya’s new “developmental democracy” as a distinct shade of the “developmental state” that has propelled Indonesia, Singapore and China from poverty to prosperity.

The decision by 12 parties to dissolve and form Jubilee Party – coupled with the mass defection of 46 opposition members of parliament, three governors and several senators mainly from the lower eastern region of Ukambani, Coast, Northern and Western Kenya – marked the dramatic rebirth of mass party politics.

Kenyatta and his strategists are fully aware of the pitfalls of mass party politics in Africa. One of the downsides of mass party politics in the 1960s and 1970s is that it undermined democracy and gave rise to authoritarianism, which, unfortunately, did not translate into development.

INTERNAL DEMOCRACY

The acid test for the success and survival of Jubilee as a mass party during and after the 2017 General Election depends on whether the party bureaucracy will broker a credible and vibrant internal democracy especially in party nominations. Kenyatta and Ruto have to make good their promise not to back any particular aspirants in 2017 and future elections.

Mass parties are not new in Kenya nor are party dissolutions and mergers. In December 1964, the opposition Kenya African Democratic Union (Kadu) dissolved to join Kanu, turning the ruling party into Africa’s best experiment in mass party politics.

The merger of Kanu and Raila Odinga’s National Development Party (NDP) in March 2002 was an attempt to reinvent Kanu as a mass party that went awry as a result of lack of internal democracy.

A more successful experiment in re-engineering mass party politics was the merger of three main opposition parties – Mwai Kibaki’s Democratic Party (DP), Charity Ngilu’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) and Michael Wamalwa’s Ford-Kenya – to form the National Alliance of Kenya (NAK), which was joined by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to form the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) that dislodged Kanu from power in the 2002 election.

However, Kenya’s history is replete with skeletons of mass parties, which have succumbed to deficiencies in internal democracy. Failure of internal democracy after the imposition of the mlolongo (queue) voting system during the 1988 election was the last nail in Kanu’s coffin. In the next decades, Kenya’s mass nationalist mass movement would shrink into a pale shadow of its past glory.

GIANT STEP

Jubilee Party is a giant step in the consolidation of democracy. At Kasarani, Uhuru promised to defend the constitution and protect democracy, including the rights of dissenters of the opposition. Democratic deficit turned Nkrumah’s and Kenyatta’s mass party edifices into the greatest threat to the rule of law and civil liberties of citizens.

Jubilee has an uphill task to manage the expectations and meet promises of leaders and communities that have joined and swelled its ranks into a mass party.

However, a self-seeking, mediocre and Machiavellian leadership at its Pangani headquarters can be detrimental to the new party. Perhaps Jubilee will need a party school to help streamline its leadership, harmonise its ideology and create a common vision of Kenya’s future.

The new political order that Jubilee envisages rests on the doctrine of separation of powers between elected party leaders and a strong party bureaucracy, mirroring the balance of powers between the three arms of government (Executive, Legislature and Judiciary). Ultimately, Jubilee has to avoid the concentration of party powers in the hands of elected leaders that has in the past stifled internal democracy and efficiency in party machinery.

Prof Peter Kagwanja is the chief executive of Africa Policy Institute.