This how Kenya can redesign its flawed electoral system

A well-thought-out political agenda-setting remains a national priority as we cruise through the last quarter of 2024. The street protests of 2023 and the attendant loss of lives were an indictment of our electoral system and our political institutions for their failure to guarantee elections so credible that, to use the words of Prof PLO Lumumba, the man on the Pangani bus would go home saying ‘we lost fairly’. In law, we call it the standard of a reasonable man. That elections have been source of massive political acrimony should incentivise us to properly diagnose the root cause of the problem and deal with it decisively.

To see ethnic elites shift allegiance to serve narrow political interests should prompt Kenyans to ask themselves how to fix the electoral infrastructure so that we don’t have to apply political salve after every election since it does not, to quote Judge Johann Kriegler, give us a clear winner.

Prof Ben Sihanya, in his constitutional law classes, insists that a polity must be alert to its own unique history, political dynamics and cultural and ethnic compositions as it enacts laws and engages in policy interventions so that there is greatest joy for the greatest number of people. We must form an electoral edifice that will help to diminish the raw ethnic census that our elections have become.

The first problem with our electoral system has been what we called 'winner-takes-it-all' when BBI was in vogue. The first past the post, as our electoral system has reduced elections into a zero-sum game and also turbo-charged bribery at the ballot.

Remember when a former Interior CS said that there were political aspirants with ties to money laundering syndicates? It’s because bribing voters effectively killed politics of ideology and big ideas. We then have people without the intellectual rigour to legislate anything buying their way into the legislative assemblies because they have money to bribe the voters. The capacity of money to muddy our political landscape is most evident during party primaries.

If it’s not criminals having an upper hand, then in a highly patriarchal society as ours, you see only men and the elderly running the show. This is because they are the ones with unhindered access, control over financial resources. This goes back to our checkered history around family law and succession. Until post-2010, girls and women hardly inherited family property, especially land. This has had the net effect of marginalising them.

The 'first past the post' rule has also weakened the sanctity of the vote as it's only in presidential elections where we insisted on 50 per cent plus one. In other seats, we have winners being declared by simple majority. In some instances, the winner has fewer votes than other contestants put together. Which then flies in the face of ‘majority having their way and minority their say’.

It is my considered view that time to seriously consider mixed-member proportional representation (MMPR) is now. With political parties losing their sheen as the custodians of political ideology, MMPR will drive voters back to political parties. Effectively, we will end the culture of political parties mushrooming during elections as special purpose vehicles. In doubt? Look at broad-based Cabinet and you certainly see the ODM of old. So it means the disintegration was merely political pursuit not an ideological chasm.

Further and most significantly, I think the two-thirds gender rule remains a political red-herring. It’s difficult and expensive to implement particularly in the age of austerity. We would have a Parliament that has 50 per cent women instead of 33 per cent that the two-thirds gender rule advocates for if we choose MMPR. I hope we redesign our electoral system.

Mr Mwaga the convener Inter-Parties Youth Forum. [e-mail]