Why Uhuru and Raila shouldn’t burden Kenyans with more offices

Talk about a government of national unity for Kenya is misplaced.

We are not at war nor are we emerging from one.

The government is not divided; Parliament is one; the governing Jubilee Party is united and enjoys a crushing parliamentary majority.

Legislatively, as they say at Westminster, the only thing the party cannot do is change a woman into a man.

There is no longer a parliamentary opposition.

The biggest non-government party, Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), became an accessory of Jubilee on March 9 when its leader Raila Odinga and President Kenyatta publicly sealed their secret and exclusive contract on Kenya.

NO PARALYSIS

There is no paralysis in government or extreme crisis in Kenya to warrant a government of national unity to focus all resources on finding solutions.

That is as it should be because Kenyans voted decisively for Jubilee to govern while handing the National Super Alliance (Nasa) a comprehensive defeat.

The natural home for Nasa parties, therefore, is the opposition benches and their mandate keeping government in check.

But this changed when ODM and Wiper, the main Nasa parties, abdicated this role and joined the parliamentary majority.

So, what is driving the search for a unity government?

Per President Kenyatta, Kenya’s winner-take-all electoral set-up endangers national security because of the violence it triggers every election cycle.

So, poll losers, he appears to suggest, deserve accommodation in government.

SAFEGUARDS

The panacea for, and security against, poll violence, therefore, is to introduce in the Constitution such safeguards for election losers hence the calls for an expanded executive complete with a prime minister’s office. And fronting this call are the architects of last year’s poll chaos.

They are President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga, the former fierce public watchdog-turned zealous, albeit untitled, government apparatchik. By their deliberately negative and hate-filled campaigns, the two led Kenya to the brink of a second post-election bloodletting.

Both are linked to the first violence of 2007 and both know that the tension that builds up in Kenya before, during and after every General Election is triggered by incitement by politicians and election rigging.

NO VIOLENCE

The first past the post set-up has not triggered violence.

Both know that Kenya’s election cycles from 1963 have not been violent.

However, in 1991 through 1997 politically instigated violence in the Rift Valley and at the Coast was aimed at driving out communities perceived not to support President Moi ahead of the 1992 and 1997 General Elections. But the polls when they came were peaceful.

Mr Odinga will know that he complained about plans to rig the 2017 General Election more than he and Nasa campaigned to win it. Again, Mr Odinga refuses to acknowledge he handed the presidency to Mr Kenyatta on a silver platter when he boycotted the Supreme Court-ordered repeat presidential poll in October.

Mr Odinga may also want to appreciate that spineless surrender and the violence unleashed to enforce it had nothing to do with our first past the post set up.

Second, there was no violence during the August 8 General Election even after the Supreme Court annulled President Kenyatta’s victory in September.

ELECTION LOSERS

The violence that followed the legal swearing-in of President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga’s treasonous one and that visited by police on demonstrators too was not related to first past the post arrangement.

President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga are, however, right that some election losers become sore and poisonous individuals.

So are protestations of quinquennial poll violence valid and reason enough for change of the constitution? No.

Based on the foregoing, President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga want to foist a referendum on change of the constitution on Kenyans on a false prospectus. This is why.

ANXIETY

One, it is politicians, among them Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga, who cause a great deal of anxiety during Kenya’s election cycles, but our polls are not violent.

Two, Kenyans grow up competing for everything at every stage of life and know that winners get everything and losers get nothing.

Kenyans must not be punished for rejecting poll candidates by being burdened with an expanded executive to reward losers.

Three, if protagonists are serious about the unfairness of first past the post, then, they should look at proportional representation as a viable alternative.

Four, it is interference with results and incompetence by election umpires, which deprive polls of integrity and credibility that threaten Kenya’s security and not the winner-takes-all format.

Mr Opanga is a commentator with a bias for politics. Email [email protected]