Is Kenya Spinning Top in Mud?
KENYA’S closely-fought presidential election has yielded all the hallmarks of a crisis waiting to happen that’s already unfolding and revealing one of the most dangerous contradictions in what’s normally called democratic elections, but always results in wider political and civil divisions, even civil war, after the democratic process is over.
It’s all about how to ensure peaceful acceptance of results in such very close, razor-thin races as just registered with Vice President William Ruto being declared winner with 50.45 per cent of the vote and Challenger Raila Odinga challenging the results.
The battle was headed to war from Day One, with outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta supporting Odinga against his Vice President.
Kenyatta and Odinga represent two of Kenya’s most powerful political dynasties, each being the son of the nation’s first President and Vice President, respectively, after independence from Britain.
Ruto, on the other hand, is being accused by his opponents of overnight enrichment by irregular means, while he says he’s only ‘a hustler’ with an impressive ‘rags-to-riches’ story.
Things started really getting rough-and-tough when, after a long delay in counting on the weekend, four of the seven-member supreme electoral body, on Monday, disassociated themselves from the results – before they were announced — and Odinga announced he’d mount a legal challenge.
Naturally, Ruto is not about to rollover and concede to any challenge, while Odinga won’t likely allow him to rule uninterrupted – and their respective supporters are already showing signs of readiness to fight-out their differences on the streets and in their neighbourhoods.
The problem nations with near equal support for two major traditional parties faces most is that human nature doesn’t always allow for ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in tight election races based on a simple majority, no matter how small.
The traditional definitions of democracy require that losers and winners accept results and move on, while the winners take home all the election bacon, forming the government and the losers being consigned totally and only to opposition minority status.
This works in most cases when the margin is too wide to contest, but not with close margins where opposition parties with major shares of the votes cast and most seats tend to flex their parliamentary muscles to give the ruling party a hard time, searching hard for any and all opportunities to force new or fresh elections.
The UK’s 2016 Brexit vote was won at a slim 52 per cent to 48 per cent margin, leaving Britain split right down the middle on the issue; and the recent French elections resulted in unprecedented alliances between traditionally hostile forces to virtually engineer results that have led to a parliamentary stalemate that’s virtually tied President Emmanuel Macron’s hands.
There have also been instances where ruling parties win more seats with less votes, opposition parties with parliamentary majorities — even by one – ensuring government measures don’t pass parliamentary hurdles.
In the 2000 US presidential elections between Al Gore and George Bush, Bush won 271 electoral votes — one more than the 270-to-win majority, despite Gore receiving 543,895 more votes (or a margin of 0.52 per cent of all votes cast).
The 50.45 per cent vs 49.15 per cent (less than one percent) margin in the Kenya vote may face a legal hurdle as the majority of the elections commissioners disassociated with the result announced by the minority.
But even if the courts were to overturn, reverse or in any way change the contested results, there would be no change in the expected unrest, the announced winners now being told they legally lost.
The Kenya situation is less about political tribalism than an inherent flaw in the traditional ‘first past the post’ Westminster electoral system practised across the British commonwealth and the wider western world, based on European elements carved out of continental experiences and imposed on colonies now running elections by the same colonially-imposed rules and regulations, as independent nations.
The Westminster model is as fraught with consistent inconsistencies often revealed in Britain itself, as in the recent parliamentary shuffles, in a country without a written constitution, to engineer the exit of a prime minister unwilling to leave 10 Downing Street and his replacement to be exclusively decided by ruling Conservative Party members, over a six-week period.
It’s easy to quarrel about and explain these inconsistencies that come to the fore when close election fights end and the two sides start clawing and kicking each other over margins too close for comfort, as in Kenya today.
Those with noses sunk deepest in resignation to the escapist view that ‘This is how democracy works…’ will not look beyond the nose-length margins in such electoral horseraces, only interested in the first to past the post, by whatever standard measurement.
But what’s already started to happen in Kenya is just a sorry repeat of spinning the democratic top in mud and expecting clean results, as the solution to the impasse is not as much in the ballot box as in the hands of the political leaders who must choose to either benefit from the chaos, or together challenge it with the equality of their respective strengths.
Here again, this is all much-easier said than done, as tradition usually wins over innovation and old ideas tend to stifle new ones, but developing countries need to examine what they can do to address such situations when they arise, as they will, anywhere, from time to time.
Guyana adopted a Proportional Representation (PR) system to address what were considered imperfections in the first-past-the-post approach, but decades later other flaws have surfaced that had to also be addressed in the hybrid system that combined old and new to create a new electoral normal that’s remained rather elusive to date.
Unfortunately, all signs are that Kenya will most likely dive into another cycle of costly post-election unrest following an election that was supposed to select a new president, but has produced a predictable national political stalemate of gigantic proportions, all in the name of Democracy.