Link between weak political parties and state dysfunction

As the ongoing party primaries heat up, there is no doubt a constant denominator is chaos, last-minute preparations and organised confusion. While Jubilee has invested heavily in portraying the opposition as chaotic, it hasn’t been spared the same and certainly in areas where the party leadership is split in terms of who should actually carry the party ticket, there is bound to be violence and anarchy.

Could it be that this widespread dysfunction of political parties is to blame for the current dysfunction of wider state institutions and the laissez faire attitude of some state officers? Two possible positions can be advanced towards this inquiry that most definitely requires wider public discourse especially during this electoral cycle.

First, it is clear that post-independence parties in Africa built almost in-grafted systems due to the proximity with the state to the extent that it became nearly impossible to separate the two.

If you look at Kanu before 2002, present-day African National Congress in South Africa, the National Resistance Movement Party in Uganda and in many other African countries, there is such an interwoven kind of co-joining of State and Party affairs to the extent that it is nearly impossible to imagine how a transition would be should an opposition party come to power.

At some point, it was alleged that Kanu had literally bequeathed itself the Kenyatta International Conference Centre and those in the know about the 2003 transition to the NARC regime attest to the fact that a heavy reliance on state systems to run party affairs compromises the ability of such parties to punch according to their weight.

The second position is tied to how transitioning democracies negotiate through the danger of political relevance. Within societies that practice winner take-it-all type of elections, the space of political competition is so narrow that defeat always spells political oblivion.

This is reflected in two dimensions. First, the incumbent during their tenure commits such widespread human rights abuses, plunders the economy and ensures that together with cronies they take every viable state project literally to bankruptcy if not gross mismanagement.

With despondency soaring high and the public keen on voting them out, they simply prolong their stay in power by either unleashing state forces the way Blaise Compaoré attempted in 2014. For such incumbents, loss in an election means accountability, which they fear.

The second dimension is when the incoming regime gets in and commits to ignore the contribution made or even acknowledge some of the long-term development projects set before. These factors taken either in isolation or combined provide for us a lens through which we can therefore see the current disorganisation within most of the dominant political parties.

Because, while the ultimate goal of every political party is to capture power, the same is never done in isolation of structures and systems that should upon inauguration run and manage core state. It is this state of lack of systems, programmes and a clear vision for the country and future that ultimately breeds wider state paralysis should a party espousing the same manage a decisive victory during an election.

It is therefore unsettling to heavily criticise the Jubilee regime when at a closer look one sees an unfortunate fertilization of the PNU and Kanu ideologies that supervised massive corruption and nepotism in the famous Goldenberg and Anglo leasing scandals.

For one therefore to expect the Jubilee regime to play by the rules of the present constitution and bring to book those found culpable of wanton economic haemorrhage is like asking a clergy to sign up for casino membership.

In the same vein, it is hypocritical to expect opposition parties to provide an alternative plan for development and economic sustainability when they never even had the preparedness to establish a shadow cabinet or even bothered to provide sound counter policy positions from a less passionate but more informed and evidence based perspective.

It is therefore a crisis of our political system that we have the present leaders and near paralysed state institutions where cases of national power outages can recur and be blamed on a monkey or where 148 students are slaughtered in cold blood and rescue forces are dispatched 8 hours later.

It means that we took the principles in Chapter 7 of the constitution that speak on political participation, representation and accountability and simply reinterpreted the same via nuances of tribe, disorder and zero accountability. So before we talk about strengthening state institutions, should we be actively looking at how we can strengthen our political parties first?

Mr Wanyonyi is a Media Regulation and Strategic Communications [email protected]