Critics of party-hopping are missing the point
What you need to know:
- Lawyers, for example, prefer darker suits and usually match them well. Dark suits remind us of the court gowns and they hide dirt well.
- Political parties in Kenya look like the inside of a clothing shop, with suits of all colours and shapes.
- It is not always easy to determine whether one has actually changed sides or is merely sitting on the fence.
A few days ago, legislators suggested alterations to the law to legitimise "party hopping".
It may strike one as odd that all this while, the party hoppers have been skipping camps anyway, without any legal basis or sense of loyalty to their party ideals.
Are there real party ideals? Political parties in Kenya have traditionally been like good suits, made to measure. They are disposable. The better-quality ones last a bit more, but not much longer than their leaders.
Suits vary widely. Lawyers, for example, prefer darker ones and usually match them well. Dark suits remind us of the court gowns and they hide dirt well. They also make the traditional ugly wig look brighter.
Medical doctors habitually go for lighter colours. Possibly they are used to white lab coats or their light-green operating theatre attire, which have to be light-coloured to ensure they are clean, untarnished and germ-free.
Engineers love brown suits and they are always in trouble. Without going into detail, they tend to be closer, logically, to Mother Nature and earth.
Architects are artists by nature and wear no suits. They are usually clean, and love informal but functional looks.
The dirt on these professional suits is also dealt with in different ways; the mistakes of lawyers are filed while the errors doctors make are, tragically, buried. The blunders of engineers fall apart while the gaffes of architects are exhibited and studied.
Political parties in Kenya look like the inside of a clothing shop, with suits of all colours and shapes. Some are made to last. Others are disposable, made just for one election, while others exist just to fill up shop space.
By and large, our political parties are weak institutions from birth and lack robust, durable political ideologies. Political discourse doesn't guide or define party positions in Kenya, which means politics remains at the level of a purely opportunistic power struggle.
The goal is no longer the common good, but simply power and how to gain and retain it.
Some of our parties declare their ideology publicly, for instance on their websites, but whether party members actually drive those "website" agendas is a different question, which shall remain unanswered.
It is doubtful that anything would change in terms of the policies legislators push for, even if party members were bound in steel to their parties, which makes party hopping fairly easy.
AN ALL-POWERFUL KANU
Actually, the greatest obstacle facing Kenya's democratic environment is not party hopping.
Kenya’s democracy has its own characteristics and context. The problem comes when we try to dress up our own specific political realities in Western or Eastern uniforms in the hope that these uniforms will create reality.
Is there any definitive political spectrum in Kenya with regard to socio-economic policies? The first political groupings were formed as a reaction to an oppressive colonial regime and arose almost spontaneously in different parts of the country.
Their region-centred focus could not ride well with a nationwide call for better conditions for Kenyan Africans, and hence the formation of the wider Kenya African Union (KAU), whose first leader was James Gichuru.
This alliance broke up soon and KAU's successor parties, Kanu and Kadu reflected this ethnic divide, up until the final annihilation of Kadu.
Kanu would later absorb some of Kadu's members. It strived to centralise power and opposed any political parties. The Kenya People’s Union (KPU) was banned in 1969, setting the stage for a de facto single-party regime until the year 1982, when the infamous Section 2A declared Kenya a one-party state.
This section was repealed nine years later, allowing the formation of other parties, which unfortunately drew on ethnic strongholds. Kanu continued to exercise its dominance until its defeat in 2002 by the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition (Narc). Narc’s useful life did not last, and the party has been in ICU since 2004.
Since then, other parties have mushroomed, so many that we lost count. We may soon need a party census, and Parliament in this respect seems rather like a maternity hospital.
POLITICAL DISHONESTY
It appears that the key factors in the formation of political parties and alliances in Kenya are the personal interests and ambitions of their members. A study of Kenyan politics by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung suggests personalisation of institutions, excessive focus on ethnicity and power, rather than policy engagement, drive politics.
According to the study, it is not easy to distinguish between parties, whether by their members or their political stance. It is wonderful to know that legislators themselves expressed mixed reactions on regulating party hopping .
Party hopping, they said, “perpetuates political dishonesty [and] is a serious betrayal of the electorate”.
Some others note that enforcement of the rule against party hopping is a hard nut to crack for the Registrar of Political Parties. It is not always easy to determine whether one has actually changed sides or is merely sitting on the fence.
The fact is, our easy-going and utilitarian approach to party politics has turned our political space into a huge party graveyard.
Dr Franceschi is the dean of Strathmore Law School. [email protected], Twitter: @lgfranceschi
