Complex electoral systems signal a dishonest populace

Kenyans have been involved in a rollercoaster of an election season like none we have ever seen before.

For the better part of this year, we have been engaged in some form of electoral activity or other, and it is understandable that many people are now claiming that they are tired of politics and would like to resume their “normal” lives again.

Of course, it is difficult to point out exactly what is preventing them from resuming their “normal” lives, but one can safely bet that you will not count politicians among the “tired” lot.

One of the reasons for the protracted elections season is our complex and labyrinthine electoral law regime, partly instituted due to chicanery engineered by past governments in order to defeat all forms of opposition.

CONSTITUTION

Unlike many other jurisdictions, we have written elaborate instructions on how our elections will be carried out in our constitution, and our elections law is perhaps among the most elaborate in the world.

Just before the current elections season, the laws were further tweaked as part of a reform package that saw the then electoral commissioners sent packing and a new team appointed to run this year’s elections.

While it is highly probable that the Wafula Chebukati-led commission is just incurably incompetent and thus bungled the election necessitating the painful processes the country has gone through after August 8, it is also possible that it would be difficult to find a team of Kenyans that would be able to implement an election in full compliance with the constitution and the election laws and regulations.

Indeed, one could aver, and be completely right, that under the current conditions any team of average Kenyans would bungle any election in a similar or worse fashion than the current electoral commission.

INTELLIGENCE

As a nation, we have a difficult conundrum to solve.

Firstly, we must all realise that on average we have only modest intellectual capabilities, and only a perishing minority of us, as in any normally distributed population, are of significantly above average intelligence.

We therefore do not have an infinite supply of very clever Kenyans available to make complex decisions on our behalf.

This makes it tough to assemble endless teams to run very complex activities such as general elections, and do it faultlessly.

DISHONESTY

Secondly, it would appear that we are a nation of extremely dishonest people who cannot pass an opportunity to benefit themselves or their ethno-political formation at the expense of the whole country.

We will steal, we will kill, and we will lie in order to “protect our interests” or those of our ethnic or political partners.

Because of this dishonesty, we have had to pay the exorbitant price of putting in place elaborate checks and balances to minimise the impact of our rapacity on national progress.

Unfortunately those we put in charge of those mechanisms are drawn from the same dishonest populace, and many eventually succumb to the same base urges bedevilling their populations of origin.

In order to address the dishonest nature of our people, we have established a complex electoral system that prescribes in excruciating detail what each of the players in our national elections must do to ensure that the process is free, fair, transparent, verifiable and many similarly virtuous adjectives.

ELECTION OFFICIALS

Unfortunately, due to deficiency of highly intelligent people to read and correctly apply the legal remedies meant to check our natural greed and rapacity, we end up with election officials who are so unintelligent that they bungle the election anyway.

In many instances, we have had the misfortune of having electoral officials who are both dishonest and daft, a lethal combination when it comes to running highly contentious national elections.

In my opinion, we must stop pretending that while we accept and even encourage dishonesty in all other spheres of our lives, we expect extreme scrupulousness in our electoral processes.

By accepting our base nature we can then fashion a simple electoral system that can be run by even the least intellectually endowed among us.

We really cannot have our cake and eat it, too!

Atwoli is Associate Professor and Dean, Moi University School of Medicine [email protected]