Why is there appetite for independent candidates?

One of the big stories of the August 8 elections in Kenya is the number of candidates standing as independents across the board. In all, a record 4,000.

Political pundits are not agreed on what it means. Some see them as sore losers who rushed to stand as independents after they were thrashed in the party primaries. A more generous view treats them as products of the rot in the main political parties, which failed to conduct honest and competent primaries and rigged out many deserving candidates and corruptly handed wins to cronies. As with most of these things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. What is clear though is that the independent trend is gaining everywhere and strongly in East Africa.

In Uganda, in the 2011 elections, the number of independents jumped sharply from a handful to an impressive 43. The combined opposition had 63 Members of Parliament while the ruling National Resistance Movement of President Yoweri Museveni had a hefty 264 MPs.

Forgetting for a moment that in Uganda it is the party that counts the votes that wins, something interesting happened in the February 2016 elections. The NRM increased the number of its MPs marginally to over 280; the combined opposition shrank by a nearly equal margin to 56 MPs; and the independents saw a good bump up to 59 (or 66 depending on how you count).

So while many independents are standing on individual tickets after failing to snag a mainstream party nomination, clearly there is voter appetite for independent candidates.

AN INDICTMENT

Which raises the question, what is it? It is probably a mistake to think the appeal of the independents is an indictment of the parties. It is likely that voters are looking for something that you can’t organise as a conventional political platform. The complexity of this is best illustrated by what happened in Senegal in 2012. The then 86-year-old Abdoulaye Wade, after two terms, tried to change the law and wangle a third term for himself.

Youssou N’Dour, the charismatic and hugely popular singer, led protests against Wade’s power grab and eventually announced he was standing for president.

He was disqualified. Wade then faced off with former protégé Macky Sall. In the first round of the vote, Wade won 34.8 per cent of the vote and Sall got 26.5 per cent.

In the second round, other candidates swung behind Sall and N’Dour, too, rallied the popular movement he had led to his ticket. Sall cleaned out with 65.8 per cent of the vote, and Wade was disgraced. N’Dour was appointed Culture and Tourism minister. After some time, the position was changed to Minister of Tourism and Leisure. A year later, in September 2013, he was sacked. Some say he resigned. He was appointed as special adviser to the president, with a brief to promote Senegal abroad.

It was a non-job, but it made political sense. N’Dour was never well-settled in political office. One of Africa’s leading cultural voices and a global star in his own right, he could never stop making music. And because of what he represents in popular culture and youth political activism in Senegal, he couldn’t comfortably be a minister in President Sall’s Alliance for the Republic party, because it necessarily didn’t represent Wade’s Senegalese Democratic Party, whose younger supporters looked up to him.

NO VESSEL

N’Dour typified the ultimate independent political spirit, but there was no organisational vessel into which it could fit. He has since plunged back into his art as if he were renewed.

In July last year he held a series of “Grand Ball” concerts. If you watch them on YouTube there is something unsettling about them. The young people are frenzied, and he owns every bit of them.

At some points, he almost doesn’t sing, just prompting the crowd to take over the songs. It is remarkable to watch. It is not something you see often. In Kenya, the closest to it is what happens when Sauti Sol performs “Kuliko Jana”.

N’Dour could only be a figure for all Senegalese. This tells us that modern-day independent politics is, really, anti-politics politics. However, that is not yet the road that takes you to State House, though it might to Parliament. In Kenya this year, the guy who gets to live in the white house on the hill in Kilimani will still either get there on the Nasa or Jubilee Party bandwagon.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of the Africa data visualiser 'Africapedia.com' and explainer site 'Roguechiefs.com'.

Twitter: @cobbo3