This may be flogging a dead horse, but let me do it, maybe I
will ‘move on’ as some people insisted a while back. To be candid, I hated that
phrase- accept and move on. Just to whip a question- has anyone ever checked
where the said people moved to, if at all they moved on? I accepted, but I did
not move on because I dint, and still I don’t know where to move on to.
I am not going to claim that the elections were rigged. I
believe the emotions have calmed down now so we can be sober and objective as we
look into an election I believe left Kenya more divided than 2008, peace aside.
As a product of public education system,
my studies were subsidized by the government. To this end, I owe my society a
service because the taxes the government collected were spent on making me the
person I am today.
I am good at asking questions, or rather questioning if
there is a difference between the two. The 2013 general elections may have been
peaceful but to minds like mine, they raised many questions for which I will endevour
to seek answers. The bane of an open mind bestowed to me by the nature for
which I must honour by doing justice to matters that need to be looked into
again.
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC)
did a good job leading to this election and they deserve a pat on the back. To
this date though, they have not been able to announce the final results of an
election held in March. If at all we have to grow our democracy beyond the
mandatory five year election cycle, everybody must ask questions including
questioning IEBC.
Let us ask ourselves; in 2002 we had a voter turnout of
57.18% which went up to 69.09% in 2007 when the stakes were so high. In 2013,
there was a voter turnout of 85.91%, a world record by itself. Looking at
Nairobi County voter turnout for 2013, the presidential elections gave us 72.9%
of the registered voters.
Looking at the increase in voter turnout between 2002 and
2007, I strongly believe the Nairobi voter turnout to be representative of the
accurate voter turnout all over the country. There is hardly any social
limiting factor or hindrance to voting in Nairobi. The level of civil awareness
is higher and we had hawk eyed agents for all the parties involved in Nairobi. Nevertheless social amenities like transport and security are much
better in the city than anywhere else in the country.
Let us take a look at North Eastern province which has
always had an average of 45% voter turnout. With no major stake in the 2013
general election, this region recorded a voter turnout of about 75% in rough
average estimates. They surpassed the growth in voter turnout in the rest of
the country something that must be attributed a social factor. Either, they
were provided with water and pasture for their livestock or polling stations
were taken to where they were grazing.
I will then shift my eyes to the Supreme Court ruling. This
I will address none other than Dr. Willy Mutunga. I blogged about Mutunga a while back my two
cents advice to the good lawyer so I am one of his admirers but the ruling on
CORD’s petition left me with many unanswered questions. I did not have the
facts so I tried to ‘move on’ but when he came out in the social media to ask
for respect, I lost the respect I had retained for him.
As a young man in the
prime of my youth I believed everything is possible; age has a way of dealing
with many things so I moved on. My friends and I gave the then Vice Chancellor
of University of Nairobi Professor Gichaga sleepless nights. On such friend
told the good professor something that has stayed in my memory to date. He
asked the professor not to look at our questioning of his leadership as a
nuisance but a good report that the university is producing brains that can
think. If we agreed with him on everything then he should rest assured that the
institution has failed in its mandate.
When six Kenyans went for the hearing on confirmation of
their charges for crimes against humanity at the ICC something happened that
our good Supreme Court bench should learn from. Judge Hans-Peter Kaul dissented
with the rest on the case of William Ruto, Henry Kosgey and Joshua Arap Sang.
There is nothing wrong with it, because his arguments were very objective and
he did not lose his job.
The six heads on that bench are part of the cream of Kenya’s
legal brains with experience in academia, jurisprudence and litigation in as
far as the Kenyan law field is concerned. If at all these six people agreed
unanimously without coercion whatsoever that the 2013 general elections were
free and fair then something is wrong somewhere.
Lastly, I am asking myself what “Free and Fair” means in
terms of definition and general application. If what transpired in this year’s
election can lead to a free and fair election then ‘some six people’ have set
the bar so low that the IEBC will never have a problem in future. The net
effect is that it will be difficult for the lower courts to nullify the
election of people elected to other posts in the same elections. May be this
will lead to an audit of the process from the bottom upwards.
We all make mistakes and no one is perfect so when you put a
group of people to undertake a task, the net strength is a sum of their
strengths and so is their imperfections. The good thing is even if we fail for
whatever reasons, lets fall forward, we will have made a forward move however
little.
I write to remain sane in this insane world. Even if I don’t
move on, asking questions is paramount for making tomorrow better than today.
I remain positive that one day Kenya will rise
above the myopic obsession of a small clique of people.
