As said in 1990s, Kenya at crossroads

"There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune...” says Brutus in Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.

Brutus is a protagonist in the play about the imminent break-up and civil war in Rome during the reign of Julius Caesar.

A rebellion led by the crafty Cassius ended in Caesar, who was seen by some senators as a dictator, being assassinated and power taken over by the plotters.

Cassius had conscripted, through persuasion, one of the most powerful senators, named Brutus, a Caesar supporter.

COLONIALISM
The mighty Roman Empire then went into war with Cassius and Brutus in leadership.

But out of the woods came one of Caesar’s stalwart generals, Mark Antony, to become the force against the new tyranny.

It seems our motherland is in a pretty similar situation as that prevailing in Rome those many years ago.

My take is that Kenya has been an enfant terrible right from the time it was created by Britain in 1895.

INDEPENDENCE

It was a tough one to assemble and the Britons realised that the lines drawn to create its boundaries were a veritable nightmare thanks to the mishmash of the natives.

When, finally, Britain finally gave us up in 1963, it was with a sigh of relief.

And they have been watching gleefully from Whitehall to see what kind of nation we would craft; for them, it was like giving up for adoption a child with many dysfunctionalities.

In the late 1990s, a few Kenyan academics and professionals crafted a book titled Kenya at Crossroads, based on four scenarios.

POLL PETITION
One of them is what we are going through.

Kenyans and the world are still trying to come to terms with the ramifications of the Supreme Court ruling in the August 8 presidential election petition, the centrepiece being whether the election of the President reflected “the will of the people”.

As a student of philosophy, I find that statement an exercise in futility.

DIVERSITY

One, mathematically, it is not possible to aggregate individual preferences to produce a national consensus (Kenneth Arrow).

In our case, it is a patent absurdity because of our cultural diversity.

The only way to resolve the problem is compromise: The democratic principle of majority — the 50 percent-plus-one rule.

Two, logically, for that rule to apply, every vote matters in its absolute purity; it must reflect the voter’s choice.

Assuming that every voter made their choice voluntarily, the job was really for the electoral commission to do a simple arithmetical addition.

This does not even require a calculator, leave alone a computer.

VOTES
The sting in the tail is, in my view, quite simple: The individual voter must have a right to find out, if necessary, the fate of their vote in the final tally.

Technically, this is an elementary process: Just let me trace the route my vote took from the polling booth to the final tally.

If I cannot find it and I know that I voted, then, ipso facto, the whole process is flawed.

Just ask a German philosopher called Karl Popper on the principle of falsifiability.

DEMOCRACY
The verdict by the learned judges was, therefore, logically consistent — the numbers notwithstanding.

All they needed was one unaccounted-for vote to nullify the election.

And therein lies the fallacy of democracy and its midwife, the electoral process.

If you are dealing with a fundamentally flawed product (democracy), does it matter how you go about proving it right or wrong?

TECHNOLOGY

The dissenting judges, therefore, had a point: Just because you found that there was one goose that was not white, do you condemn the entire kingdom of the geese?

And worse, who will bear the cost and the consequences of that decision?

My own view is radical: Democracy and its attendant institutions and fallibilities have outlived their usefulness in a world where technology can even make better judgments than human beings — a computer recently beat Gary Kasparov in chess.

If we can take a man to the moon and back and even discover a new galaxy called Sombrero that is 28 million light-years away, surely we can reinvent democracy, which was created by Greeks and refined by Romans just 3,000 years ago!

SUPREME COURT
As a passing point, the Supreme Court was ably advised about their role by none other but one of their truly learned friends, senior counsel Fred Ojiambo, on November 14 last year, when the new court was being inaugurated.

They were forewarned and, therefore, forearmed.

Finally, maybe Kenya can show the way out of the democratic mess — just like Mark Anthony when he trounced Caesar’s assassins.

But does our legal fraternity have the capacity, or the will, to do it given their past reputation as professionals?

Prof Kimura is a retired senior university administrator. [email protected].