Parties law bad for multipartyism

Given the bickering threatening to dismember the ruling Jubilee Party but only muted by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is time to review our electoral system — specifically to abrogate the Political Parties Act (PPA).

In its current form, the law does a lot of barking but no bite. Part of the problem is it was a civil society-inspired content that borrowed lofty etiquette from NGO boardroom set-ups.

Nonetheless, after nine years, impracticalities and redundancies have emerged in the Act, rendering the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties (ORPP) a decorated clerks’ desk with little power than as a conveyor belt.

The Jubilee implosion negates the myth that parties in Kenya are functional political entities. In Kenya, political parties exist only at election time.

They retire into dormancy until the next election circle, for ORPP to muse over fictitious membership.

REFUGE FOR DEFAULTERS

The ORPP is supposed to be the prefect of political parties and superintend over their registration, membership, funding and dispute resolution.

But none of the 69 registered parties is up to date with genuine records of 1,000 members, physical offices and local officials each in at least 24 counties.

The ORPP would not know that; however, because it has no monitoring capacity, it lives on the fiction sold by the parties.

Besides, its conflict resolution is a tedious process that arbitrates nothing. Now that Jubilee objectors have filed their dissent, the ORPP will certainly play “mediator” by directing them to internal party organs first.

Often this is just a cyclic stopgap to the Political Parties Disputes Tribunal (PPDT), another bureaucracy.

The PPDT is a compromised inconvenience that works part-time, peppering over matters long enough to draw allowances. Its rulings have often drawn High Court rebuke. It is a refuge for party defaulters.

PUNITIVE QUALIFICATIONS

Indeed, if it were to be scrapped, nothing would be missed in the administration of justice in political parties.

Article 92 (f) of the Constitution provides that “Parliament shall enact legislation to provide for the establishment and management of a Political Parties Fund (PPF)".

The PPA, however, violates this provision by determining a discriminative criterion that cuts off parties from the taxpayer-funded fund.

The administration of the PPF is a misnomer and offends the Constitution. It runs counter to the cardinal rule that all votes are equal.

Art. 23 of the PPA creates the PPF, whose source of funding is Kenyans’ taxes, referred to in Art. 24 as “(a) such funds not being less than zero point three per cent (0.3pc) of the revenue collected by the national government as may be provided by Parliament”.

Notably, in “providing for”, Parliament played tomfoolery by setting punitive qualifications to the fund by parties.

It mocks Chapter 2 Art. 4(2) of the Constitution, which states: “The Republic of Kenya shall be a multiparty democratic state…”. Only two out of six parties that participated in the 2017 presidential election shared Sh795.3 million of projected Sh2.651 trillion revenue in 2019/20.

The assumption of the Constitution is that every vote counts, and that should be the consideration in the allocation of the PPF money.

FUNDS ALLOCATION

In Chapter 4 (Bill of Rights), Art. 38, on political rights, the Constitution is adamant that “Every citizen has the right to make political choices, which include the right to form or to participate in forming a political party and to participate in the activities of, or recruit members for, a political party”.

It adds: “Every citizen has the right to free, fair and regular elections based on universal suffrage and the free expression of the will of the electors for any elective public body or office established under this Constitution”, and “Every adult citizen has the right without unreasonable restrictions to be registered as a voter and to vote by secret ballot in any election or referendum”.

We make nonsense of these provisions on participation when we lock parties out of the PPF.

In the 2013 elections, 35 per cent voter-taxpayers elected 478 MCAs, 71 MPs, 12 senators and 11 governors and, for that democratic expression, did not receive favour with an unconstitutional Art. 25 of the PPA, which arbitrarily requires parties to secure five per cent of the total vote to qualify for the PPF.

The violation further demands that a party must master elected three governors, three senators, 20 MPs and 40 MCAs to qualify. Indeed, Art. 25 of PPA defeats the purpose of the fund to grow political parties under Art. 26.

How would parties grow when they are denied funding?

Mr Kabatesi is a communications and governance consultant; [email protected].