'Broad-based government' that chokes citizens' voice bad for democracy

President William Ruto and ODM leader Oburu Oginga at a past event. [File, Standard]

Kenya spent over Sh40 billion on the 2022 General Election. This is public money. Taxpayer's money. We spent it on elections. And then, within two years, the Opposition joined the government it had campaigned against. We must ask ourselves a hard question. What was the point?

The Constitution of Kenya 2010 is one of the finest democratic documents in the region. It was written in flesh and blood in the aftermath of 2007 communal disharmony. Kenyans died for it. Article 1 is unambiguous. It declares that all sovereign power belongs to the people. The people exercise that power through their elected representatives. Elections are the instrument through which that power is expressed. They are not a formality or a ritual. They are the voice of the citizens.

When citizens vote, they are making a deliberate, conscious, constitutional choice. They are choosing who should govern. They are also determining who should hold the governors to account. Article 93 of the Constitution establishes Parliament. Its functions include oversight of the Executive. That oversight only works if Parliament contains voices that put to test any governmental policy. Opposition is not noise but architecture that’s designed into the system.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is constitutionally mandated under Article 88 to conduct free, fair and credible elections. The State funds this institution generously. But that funding rests on a foundational assumption that the results of elections will not be circumvented colourably. This is true not only in the counting of votes but also in the political consequences that follow.

When opposition figures accept Cabinet appointments, they do not merely change their personal circumstances. They shake the foundation of accountability that the election was designed to build. Consider a voter who chose an opposition candidate due to anger of rising cost of living. She wanted someone in Parliament to challenge the budget and to demand answers from the government.

Today, the Opposition is part of the government, supporting policies they promised to expose. They are defending the same budget they once condemned and in so doing, they have flipped the voice of the citizen on its head without his permission. Presently, this practice euphemistically called the ‘broad-based government' sounds reasonable and designed to unite. But it’s doing more damage than good. It has resulted in the erasure of electoral choice that overrides the public decision of millions of voters.

No provision in the Constitution supports this practice. Article 130 defines the composition of the national executive. It does not contemplate a system where losing parties are absorbed into government for political convenience. The drafters of our Constitution deliberately created a competitive political system. They did not create it so that competitors could simply merge after the race.

The financial burden on the economy is colossal. The IEBC budget. The security deployment. The printing of ballot papers. The training of polling officials. The voter education campaigns. The tallying centres. This entire infrastructure exists to produce a result. A democratic verdict. That verdict, once produced, cannot be quietly set aside because the losers and winners find it mutually agreeable to share power.

I’m not suggesting that it’s unconstitutional to unite Kenya. There are legitimate constitutional mechanisms for national unity governments. Kenya has used it before — under duress, after a crisis. But such mechanisms require extraordinary circumstances. They demand transparency in making the public understand its necessity.

Yet, such extreme mechanisms cannot become the default setting after every election cycle. If such becomes routine, elections become theatre. Citizens become spectators and the ballot becomes currency without value.

Democracy is not only about voting day. It is about the four or five years that follow. It is about whether the government respects the electorate. It is about an opposition that is genuinely independent and truly motivated to expose governmental failures. Co-opted oppositions do not hold governments accountable. They become complicit in their conduct. If political leaders intend to govern together regardless of election outcomes, let them campaign on that platform before elections. Let the citizen decide with full information. Kenyans cannot fund a contest that gets negated after every election cycle without their consent.

Mr Nyatundo is an assistant professor in Law at Christ Academy Institute of Law in Bangalore, India