Jun. 11, 2016, 12:00 am
By DR KIPRONO CHESANG
President Uhuru Kenyatta and Cord leader Raila Odinga during a past function.
President Uhuru Kenyatta and Cord leader Raila Odinga during a past function.
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
WhatsApp
Email
Pages
1
2
3
4
›
»
The campaigns for the 2017 general elections are on. It is a battle of un-equals, either as belligerent as the other. Jubilee is muscular, bashful, and haughty.
Its strategy is shaping up as a drawn out campaign aimed at brazenly exhausting an already weakened opposition.
Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto can count on the psychological advantage of incumbency, a powerful state machinery and an intimidating war chest. CORD is resource-starved, somewhat disillusioned and almost entirely dependent on the sheer force of Raila Odinga, arguably its biggest, most potent asset.
He is bellicose and desperate. This is his last real shot at the presidency.
Yet the battle for 2017 is therefore not only an electoral contest between Odinga and Kenyatta.
It is also a battle for a place in history.
Odinga knows that he is on the back foot against a daunting opponent and is making a wager for moral victory, whether he wins or loses the 2017 elections.
He is poisoning the well, driving a street campaign to discredit the Independent Elections and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), thus creating a legitimacy gap in the 2017 elections, months in advance.
A legitimacy gap would destabilise Kenyatta’s legacy plans.
Taking the battle to the street disrupts Jubilee’s road-show to punt their development record.
The street is Odinga’s natural habitat. It is an unfamiliar battle-ground for Kenyatta, who is already floundering, deploying truncheons instead of artful counter-propaganda.
It still is a massive gamble for Odinga, but that is all he is left with. That plays into Odinga’s mission to conjure himself up as the moral edifice of Kenya’s pathological democracy.
The end-game for Odinga here is easy to imagine; re-establishing the epic of the Odingas’ battle against a weighty establishment and lewd national history whose real face is Jomo Kenyatta, who has been re-lived for 38 years by his own parodies: his long-standing and loyal underling, Daniel Moi, his Finance Minister of 16 years, Mwai Kibaki, and now his son, who is brooding his own Kalenjin parody, William Ruto.
That changes the game from merely playing up uninspiring moments of Kenyatta’s first term.
He will be lampooned as the devious child of his father. Kenyatta now has to show cause why he should not be chalked down in history as the continuation of an insalubrious history of kleptocracy, authoritarianism and ethnic supremacism.
Even attempting a response dooms him to failure. He is his father’s son!
His best chances against Odinga is to shift the moral axis. He needs a soaring and game-changing feat that will atone for his father’s undeniable sins and give him a real chance of claiming a place in posterity.
Fortunately for him, there is a massive opportunity right under his
President Uhuru Kenyatta and Cord leader Raila Odinga during a past function.
nose to reset the moral contest. Kenya’s democracy needs fixing.
He
has the means, and imperative to do so if he is serious about a place
in history. He will need to focus on the problem rather than its
symptoms. The principal problem of Kenya’s democracy
today is the lack of a solid constitutional and regulatory framework for
political funding. What exits needs shaking up.
Political
party funding is not only about giving cash to political parties. It is
also about regulating political funding; what kind of funds are
acceptable, how they are spent with audits for the same, how much money a
party can accept for a single funder and how much of it is used on
what.
It is the very means of protecting democracy itself. It
insulates the state from contamination, and even capture by rogue
privateers to who use political funding to move the levers of politics.
It
also moderates the resource differentials between competitors and rigs
the playing field in favour of right, rather than might.
The
nature of political funding in Kenya has a tortured history that
somewhat clouds its real implications on competitive politics.
The
1990s saw a significant infusion of foreign funds to support
democratisation and the institution of a culture of human rights,
primarily a foreign agenda that coincided with that of discontents of
Daniel Moi’s dictatorial rule.
While this helped a rag-tag
opposition’s political agenda, wealthy politicians directly funded their
own political parties, which they also used as vehicles for their very
personal presidential ambitions.
The ruling party itself, KANU, directly self-funded from state resources.
From
2003 to 2013, a precarious balance of power between Odinga and Kibaki
created an equilibrium of political odds in the 2007 and 2013 elections,
that forced the owners of wealth in the country, acutely aware of the
force of state power in determining fortunes, to wager on either.
The
result was a political environment flush with cash from privateers
whose contribution to campaigns was the ante for capturing the
government.
The result was a blind spot on the constitution
making process, so that the current constitution, developed, and
eventually passed at the tail end of Kibaki’s rule, glossed over
political funding.
Today, such privateers are not willing to
fund a weakened opposition that, to put it bluntly, is unlikely to wrest
power from the incumbent in the coming elections.
The brusque
implication is that the incumbent, who already has access to immense
political resources, is in a better position to raise even more
resources. The opposition on its part is likely to at the very best
attract only a fraction of the resources it raised for the 2013 general
elections.
Today’s opposition is no
President Uhuru Kenyatta and Cord leader Raila Odinga during a past function.
an innocent victim.
Politicians
across the political spectrum have to date been happy conduits of shady
political funding. Citizens themselves have not questioned the sources
of stupendous amounts of money that trade hands during campaigns.
They
should. In this game, there are no free lunches. Those that we borrow
from to purchase political power always demand their pound of flesh once
we are in power. This is the axis around which grand corruption in
Kenya rotates.
Shady political funding too is what puts Kenya on the cusp of metamorphosing into a fully-fledged robber-baron democracy.
Certain
trends already seem to damn us in this direction; an illicit dalliance
between politics and money; a sick ethic that legitimates this link; a
consistent pattern of scoundrels making it to the top; acceptance, or
resignation to corruption as part of the everyday and ‘normal’ order of
democracy; an unusually high tolerance for political hypocrisy; a
lottery mentality obsessed with the miniscule odds of ‘striking it’;
‘ownership’ of political parties, and one could go on.
The
result is a vicious cycle, which helpfully, can still be broken, by not
by ordinary citizens, but by an unfettered executive that does not have
to pander to popular whims.
This is where John Wayne Kenyatta
should strut in. Kenyatta does not need additional private funding. He
controls state resources. He is also a man of no modest means.
Barring
a stellar fight-back by the opposition, he will likely stroll into a
second term. It means he can, and should cut out the moneybags in the
shadows from the 2017 campaigns. His means can only be a stout framework
for state funding of political parties.
Kenyatta should table a
bill for princely state funding for political parties. He should peg
the figure for funding on the budgets that political parties used in the
2013 political campaigns.
The country’s intelligence agencies
should have a very good sense of these numbers. That is a huge carrot
that should whip parliament to support the bill.
He will
however need to couple the funding with a stringent regulatory framework
that requires parties to address internal democracy and governance
issues, most importantly, having substantial representation across the
country’s 47 counties, democratically elected party officials, and
stringent regulations on expenditure.
Such a move will be
doubly expedient. It helps his moral battle against Odinga by changing
the terms of political debate, and increases his odds for posterity.
In
the immediate term, it alters the priorities of political parties, and
in particular forces a cash-starved opposition to sort out internal
governance issues to access political funding. Even to opposition
parties, that would be a justifiable distraction.
It is also expedient that Kenyatta does not really need
No comments:
Post a Comment