Disorder in ODM a warning signal of self-destruction

By PHILIP OCHIENG


The juvenile disorder in the ODM reminds me of snide comments reaching my ears from the campus. It is that those of us who opposed the multi-party bandwagon were enemies of “democracy”.

Accordingly, a system can be democratic only if it is multi-party. Ignorance of history stands there like Okot p’Bitek’s elephant.

In The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru describes an example in the Sub-Continent in which disagreements were resolved through fully free single-party debates and referendum-like voting.

In Unesco’s General History of Africa, we learn that popular discussions preceded a king’s election among a certain Nilotic community.

In The Greek Myths, Robert Graves testifies that the Periclean revolution was fully informed by the Thesmophoria – an African law code – which Solon had borrowed during a tour of the Nile Valley.

This revolution was what probably spawned the word “Democracy” (Demos, “the rabble”, and Kratia, “rule”).

Under Pericles, the newly victorious plebeian party enjoyed full freedom of opinion within itself, differences being resolved by means of regular voting. Such resolutions were then deployed to dictate a new socio-economic structure.

This intra-party freedom in policy-making but use of policies thus made to dictate matters to the former oppressors – this original meaning of democracy – was what Karl Marx hoped to revive through his “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Democracy as a free-for-all in which a million parties contend is a liberal corruption perpetrated only during Euro-America’s liberal revolutions of 1688-1870. That is why it is called liberal democracy or bourgeois democracy or capitalist democracy or multi-party democracy.

The “pluralism” with which its Western intellectual exponents deafen our ears exists only in numeral terms. It is completely monolithic because what all those parties express are but various nuances of the liberal ideology.

The liberal state becomes “democratic” only after certain innocuous aspects of Pericleanism have been smuggled into it.

It can afford such multi-party anarchy because the Western liberal revolution takes place after a deep econo-intellectual accumulation has insured society against every political wind.

Yet anarchy is the ideal being expressed whenever an American tycoon moans that there is “too much government”.

“Liberty” is that ideal situation in which Drucker’s “Economic Man” is making money without any kind of political inspection and social responsibility.

That, in short, is the definition of liberalism. The democratic franchise — “universal suffrage” – was grafted onto it only after fierce struggles by the Levellers, Suffragettes and trade unions.

Can a Third World state afford such an anarchic squandering of political energy?

Only if we can conflate our energies into a single national reservoir or party can we achieve that maximum political discipline with which to deal effectively with such social roadblocks as tribalism, poverty, disease, political hooliganism and ecclesiastical conmanship.

That was what the original champions of single-party democracy in Africa had in mind.

One of them, Julius Nyerere, genuinely tried to build a single political instrument which, although dictatorial in many necessary ways, was remarkable by its internal latitude of opinion.

Simply because all dissent had to pass into a single crucible, opinions were expressed decently, constructively and without dampening anybody’s spirit.

The single-party rod decayed into a tool of economic plunder, intellectual stultification and political tyranny only when Mzee Kenyatta began to abuse the original national consensus.

But it was Daniel arap Moi who turned the party into a machine for the ritual “processing” of Stalin-like one-man decrees which you opposed only on the pain of excommunication and torture.

The PNU-ODM rapprochement is a glimpse into our oneness of 1964. But the euphoria vanishes as soon as former campus hot-heads become the ODM’s policy-makers.

The cinch is that, upon their mass expulsion of dissidents, they will have plunged into the same Noachian deluge which once swallowed Mr Moi.

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