Perhaps the greatest political significance of the new constitution (the first anniversary of which will be celebrated in just two days) is that it is structured to compel the political class to seek consensus. It’s all very well to have those citizens right to this and that, but if the imperial president had been allowed to remain as in the days gone by, then none of those rights would have counted for anything. In the end we would have had a president who could do as he or she wants.
And insofar as the rejection of the 2007 presidential elections results arose to a large extent from the earlier arbitrary selection of members of the old Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK), we know now that these arbitrary decisions by a president are a recipe for trouble. But that is all in the past now. Henceforth, presidential favour alone cannot guarantee anyone, however qualified, some high position in government. Some kind of general acceptance that you are the right man or woman for the job is also required.
The recent announcement of the nominees for Attorney General, Controller of Budget, and Auditor General, is a case in point. Even if we did not have a coalition government, the president – under the new constitution – would have been obliged to consult among key political figures and to seek assurance that his nominees would not be rejected by parliament.
This is a long way from the days when a Kenyan president only needed to consult his personal friends and his court jesters, on who should be given a big job, and who should be unceremoniously dumped. And the advantages of this new system are not only that they encourage the selection of candidates worthy of the high office they aspire to. No less significant is that such a system protects a president from his own worst instincts.
It is a great temptation, for powerful men, to make choices which will affect the future of a nation, purely as a response to pressure from their political associates. But when you know that your choice will be subject to a vetting process over which you have limited control or maybe no control at all, then you will have to be very careful in your decisions, lest you end up being made a fool of when your chosen candidate meets with rejection.
These checks and balances within a political system may seem like a nuisance to whoever wields presidential power at any one point. But in the end they are the only way of ensuring that the once almighty president does not end up inside a cage within a courtroom, as was the case with Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak; or hiding inside a basement shelter, as did the former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo, or more recently, Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi.
But if the dilution of presidential power is a great blessing to any nation, the policy of devolution that is derived from it, has some interesting ramifications. My reading of the situation is that it will be virtually impossible for any governor to be reelected and that for the ambitious politician who hopes to make a career of many years in politics, it is better to try to be a senator or an MP.
This logic is rooted in what may be defined as ‘the psychology of poverty’, and there are two ideas here: first is that the pressures which a poor man or woman has to face in coping with the demands of making ends meet when they have so little room to maneuver tends to drive them into making wrong decisions. A perfect example of this is in the way Kenyans will so often vote in MPs whose only virtue is that they had plenty of money to hand out during an election campaign. For the price of a packet of maize flour, or half a kilo of sugar, these voters then have to endure five years of neglect at the hands of an MP who considers them ‘fully paid for’.
But there is the other aspect of this psychology of poverty, which is that poor people are impatient with long term solutions, and will demand immediate results, even if there is little likelihood of this. And it seems to me that no matter how hard a governor works, he will not be able to satisfy the sky-high expectations of the electorate. In the end, devolution will guarantee one-term governorships just as surely as if it had been legislated for in the new constitution.
The writer comments on topical issues.
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