No, blame not the independents, but our ‘raw’ democracy

An American business magnate and former politician Henry Ross Perot made an allusion about how crude politics is. He said, “War has rules, mud wrestling has rules - politics has no rules”. Politics thus far has proven to be such a lawless jungle, if the debate on Independent Candidates is anything to go by.

The question has been about how independent they are, given that they all support some presidential candidate and got their ‘independence’ after being felled at the party nomination.

Only a few have walked the talk. However, it is shallow to look at independent candidates without mentioning how confounded, dishevelled and dysfunctional our politics has been for a while.

If you were to compare ours to systems abroad, the muddle medley we call our political system would show you the bile against the so called independents is us looking for a scapegoat to walk us through the frustration. I will explain.

It is by no accident that the position of Senator has somewhat lost its colour. Apart from very few cases, a number of sitting senators are gunning for gubernatorial and even parliamentary seats. In the recently concluded party nominations, very few people knew anything about ODM’s candidate for Nairobi Senate until it was switched to Edwin Sifuna.

While there was a melee everywhere else, nominations for senate positions were unusually quiet. If you take your time, you will find out that unlike gubernatorial aspirants, we know very little about any senatorial aspirant in the 47 counties. Unlike in 2013 where we had an untested system, the political class has quickly found out that there is no pomp in oversight.

There is no adrenaline in only approving Bills that affect counties while occasionally rescuing impeached governors from getting the boot. Certainly, there is no motivation in walking around without any extra ‘budget’ in your pocket. We could as well do without the senate, but because of our dysfunctional system, the sleeping ‘lion’ will live on.

In the same political system, the term ‘Integrity’ is debatable. Anyone and everyone can vie for anything and everything. On the Leadership and Integrity act, clauses on vetting and declaration of wealth for people seeking elective positions are a passing mention.

Both the Registrar of political parties and the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) ignore the requirement of vetting candidates who seek elective positions, while the Judiciary excused itself from interpretation of Chapter Six citing lack of jurisdiction especially on elective positions. Anyone implicated in a scandal, graduates from whatever level they are in to a ‘target of political witch-hunt’.

What is left of it is an open system, for anyone. You could as well go for a plunder festival in a ministry or a parastatal, hawk drugs on national television, walk with the misdemeanour of a felon all your life, and when you want that political seat your name will be top on the ballot paper.

So it amazes in such a dumbfounding capacity when we are surprised by a clueless group of independent candidates who after calling themselves independent, walk right into an arena and launch an Alliance of Independent Candidates. Why would we be surprised when after losing a party nomination ticket, a candidate is so quick to pick the independent tag? We should not, it could be worse.

Everything we are in is a symptom of a political system that has become so encumbered with petty rivalries and vindictive campaigns that we are constantly at war with ourselves.

There are candidacies in this election that are comical to the brink of tragedy. There are those who want to govern counties with a Lilliputian grasp of economic matters. We are in a system where sworn rivals and parties put aside their mutual antipathy, their electoral history, and sometimes even their principles if any, to jump into the government or a chance to be in it. We are in a system that has an over-focus on individuals and personalities, a situation that has undermined normalisation, stability, serious policy debate, and institutional memory. We are too dysfunctional to find fault in independent candidates.

Our system has been the fatal flaw that has transformed one of Africa’s most influential nations into a reckless, out of control, expensive monster offering very little solutions. If anything, it is a bit of a surprise that we have not collapsed on the weight of our own system. However, the focus should not be on trivial things such as how independent a candidate is or is not. To correct the mediocrity of it all, we cannot afford to start by covering a wound when the rot is in it. Hardly.

There are serious questions we have to ask ourselves, and that includes how much we want out of our own system. Let us not make Independents our scapegoats, we are entirely disoriented.

murepack@gmail.com