Kenya needs to discuss agenda of political inclusion

There is a lull in the country’s politics, following the establishment of a parliamentary committee with the mandate to negotiate arrangements that will be acceptable to the dominant political actors around the management of the next elections, following widespread doubts about the suitability of the existing Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to run the elections.

It is expected that the parliamentary process will agree to a no-fault package that will allow the exit for the IEBC commissioners who will also be paid some money for the loss of office, a process that will lead to the appointment of new commissioners who will run the next elections.

At this stage, it is less clear whether consensus is likely on how the next set of commissioners will be picked, or on how many these should be. In many quarters, it is felt that the maximum nine commissioners that are allowable under the Constitution are too many and that there should be a reduction of numbers when the country appoints the next IEBC commissioners. There is already a legally-defined process for the appointment of commissioners which places significant responsibility, and privilege, in the hands of the President as the Head of State. Because the President is also a political competitor, opposing political actors do not regard as justified the existing arrangements which confer on the President a central role in appointing commissioners who will go on to preside over elections in which he is also a competitor, especially since the opposition does not get a comparable chance to participate in the appointment of the commissioners.

While it is to be hoped that a compromise can be found which would allow the replacement of IEBC commissioners to proceed and preparations of the next elections to begin, the replacement of the IEBC is necessary but insufficient to address the challenges the country is likely to face in the next elections. The country’s political problems run deeper than the ongoing parliamentary discussion, and efforts to address those problems must continue ahead of the next elections.

The parliamentary committee is working in a context of heightened political manoeuvring which has left the western part of the country rocking from claims by competing politicians that the region will vote for them in the next elections. As part of this, the Deputy President, William Ruto, came out with the claim that he induced ODM secretary-general, Ababu Namwamba, to abandon his party and that the western region will now be working with Jubilee.

ETHNOPOLITICAL CONFIGURATION

As the country prepares for its next elections, there is an attempt to create a different ethnopolitical configuration from what currently exists. At the moment, Jubilee mainly represents the Kikuyu/Kalenjin ethnicities while large parts of the rest of the country have a political home in different opposition parties. Assuming that Jubilee meets success in luring the Luhya community to its side, this will still leave a large part of the country, defined along ethnic lines, outside of the government and therefore in the political cold.

Organising the country’s politics along ethnic lines inherently produces proprietorship over political power and also heightens feelings of political exclusion. Since, at the moment, political power is controlled by a Kikuyu/Kalenjin alliance, this fact alone explains why, whatever the Jubilee leadership has tried to do to promote inclusion, has not worked. A leading complaint around the country is that there are not enough people serving in senior public positions who hail from outside the two core Jubilee ethnic groups. At the same time, senior representation in government positions for communities outside Jubilee does not give pleasure to their regions because they largely see any people appointed to government from their own regions as sellouts. The reason is that since a kind of proprietorship of public power has been established which excludes most of the country, anybody working with the government does so on a personal basis rather than as a representative of their community.

A key challenge for the country has to be how to increase a sense of belonging as will erase the distinction that now exists between owners of the government, and those who are merely invited to work for them.

At the moment, there is no platform for a discussion of these types of issues which go to the core of the country’s inclusion agenda. The conduct of the top leadership in Jubilee, of going out to further fracture the country along ethnic lines, just to preserve their own political power, is the opposite of the politics of inclusion that is reasonably expected of the country’s leadership.

It is also evidence that the agreed agenda for reforms in relation to the next elections is narrow and unlikely to respond to the most fundamental of the country’s problems. With or without a reformed IEBC, and whether or not the next elections will be conducted in a free and fair manner, the stage is being set to differentiate between the ethnicities that will be “owners” of the next government and those who will be “outsiders” and who, at best, can only hope for favours from those that take political power. The country needs to discuss the agenda of inclusion. That agenda is crucial to the survival of Kenya as a united country. The ongoing parliamentary talks are not designed to discuss that agenda. The Jubilee leadership is also not keen on such a discussion, and even appears to fear such a discussion.

On their own, citizens must continue organising and must find ways of discussing how to promote political inclusion in a country where political leaders are promoting what Former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga called “wedge politics”.

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