Mandatory voting not the solution

The recent proposal to make voting mandatory in Kenya needs further debate. In a fractured country like ours, this is unlikely to help much in building legitimacy and trust in political leadership.

Where power capture is the ultimate price; as is clearly apparent now, the loser can always rubbish the election outcome. Supporters of mandatory voting see it as a civic duty, like paying taxes.

It is seen to boost legitimacy and genuine mandate to the winner. This is all well in advanced political institutions.

About 20 countries have mandatory voting. In Australia, eligible voters pay a 50-dollar fine if they abstain. Senior citizens are exempted.

We are in a perpetual Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ where distrust runs deep. With ‘my-tribe-must-win’ mentality entrenched in Kenya, mandatory voting will be superfluous.

I doubt Mr Odinga’s grouse is only about IEBC. Surely, CORD should be aware of this: More people voted in Kiambu in 2013 than in Siaya, Homa Bay and Kisumu combined. But that’s irreverent in the current anti-IEBC campaigns.

Numbers only work if both their peddlers and the audience have mutual trust in them, their meaning and the processes that generate them.

But is it even about trust here? Is what we are witnessing not naked political ambitions that must be fulfilled, institutions and the country be damned?

The implication of the CORD campaign is that majority winner in elections does not necessarily translate to political legitimacy. People can lose an election, and still mobilise their followers to protest against the winner.

Legitimacy is fluid in a country where State power capture by tribal proxies is the ultimate price.
Perhaps to decrease this appetite for State power we need to kill the zero-sum game that is our politics.

Were legitimacy the problem, CORD would be mobilising its followers to vote out Jubilee next year. But it must be easier to precipitate a political crisis rather than mobilise voters for the ballot.

Why do we vote? In short, we do it to renew the contract between the Government and the public. The Government agrees to oversee the provision of public goods; roads, schools, security and so on, things that the private sector will not provide in the normal market system.

The ‘serikali saidia’ woman was mightily ridiculed. Yet, erecting dykes is not a private responsibility. In a proper democracy, the affected residents would punish the leaders at the ballot.

The problem in Kenya is not lack of institutions. These are there to ensure equity, inclusiveness and so on. But what happens when these institutions do not allow our tribal king to have an easy walk into State House? What happens when the vote is no longer enough to make ‘mtu wetu’ win or favour his personal ambitions?

There are countries where voting does not exist and they are doing quite fine, at least economically and in terms of cohesiveness. China’s record as a democracy is not famous. But that did not prevent it from excelling economically.

I would not want to live there. But I am sure thousands of Chinese wouldn'tt want to live in a democratic Kenya either. Lee Kuon Yew, literally built Singapore like an economic project. “I have no time for experimentation with western democracy.

All I want is that every Singaporean to have a house, clean water, food and live in dignity,” he once said. He was a despot to some.
Democracy without development could easily become anarchy, towards which Kenya sometimes tilts. In this situation, political demagogues thrive very well as we are witnessing.

The Kenya state wobbles. Political violence is symptomatic of this. Failed governments are voted out in democracies, but the State remains. The dysfunctional nature of the Kenyan state means there cannot be an effective national government, a situation agitators exploit fully.

Mandatory voting won’t work because voting in Kenya is not out of patriotic fervour but to put our tribal proxy kings in power. All this brouhaha in the streets is just about that.
Why don’t people vote then?

Some don’t because they think it will not make any significant difference in their lives. Many others just make an economic calculation, what economists call ‘opportunity cost’. Instead of queuing for hours to vote, I could go looking for money.

For the majority of Kenyans whose every hour is a struggle to make an extra coin to survive, queuing for hours to vote is pure waste of time. This thinking is called ‘rational ignorance’.

The converse is also true: hounds of jobless youths turn out for voting in the primaries for monetary gain. It is no news that voter bribery is part of our electoral politics.

The only consolation in mandatory voting is that numbers could be flashed on the faces of those who cry foul after elections. But I insist: our tribal king could always tell us that the numbers have been doctored. Couldn’t he?