Kenya has spent more than six decades trying to
build a cohesive nation out of extraordinary diversity. We are a country of
many ethnic communities, languages, cultures, faiths and regional identities.
That diversity is not a weakness to be managed; it is a national asset to be
represented.
The question we should now have the courage to ask is whether our system of government is optimally designed for that reality.
I believe the time has come for Kenya to seriously consider a parliamentary system of government: not as a solution to the political fortunes of any individual or party, but as the next stage in strengthening our democracy.
Our presidential system inevitably concentrates enormous political attention on one national contest. The constitution requires a successful presidential candidate to obtain more than half of all votes cast and at least 25 per cent of the votes in more than half of Kenya’s counties. These requirements were deliberately designed to encourage broad national support.
Yet the practical consequence remains that every five years, millions of Kenyans are drawn into a contest centred overwhelmingly around who will occupy one office.
In a diverse society, that creates powerful incentives for political mobilisation around identity and arithmetic: Which communities are aligned? Which regions bring sufficient votes? Who must combine with whom to assemble the winning coalition?
Academic research on Kenyan politics has repeatedly examined the persistence of ethnicity in electoral competition. One study of Kenya’s 2013 presidential election found that voters whose ethnic communities did not have a co-ethnic candidate in the race were more than two-and-a-half times as likely to change their voting intentions. Other scholarship has characterised Kenyan parties historically as either mono-ethnic formations or multi-ethnic alliances, even while acknowledging their gradual evolution.
We should not blame Kenyans for responding rationally to the incentives created by our political institutions. We should examine the incentives themselves.
A parliamentary system could fundamentally change them.
Imagine an election in which the central question in every constituency is straightforward: who is the most capable person to represent us in Parliament?
A teacher from Taita Taveta, an entrepreneur from Mandera, a lawyer from Kisumu, a farmer from Trans Nzoia and a young political leader from Mombasa would all enter the same institution as members of Parliament. Their communities would not need to produce a presidential candidate to participate meaningfully in determining the country’s leadership.
The parliamentary majority would form the government and its leader would become Prime Minister.
This would make every parliamentary contest consequential to the formation of the national government. The road to the highest executive office would run through Parliament rather than through the construction of one enormous personality-centred presidential campaign.
That distinction matters.
Comparative political scholarship has described a presidential executive as, in an important sense, an “indivisible” political prize because one individual occupies the presidency for a fixed term. Parliamentary government, particularly where coalitions are necessary, can make executive authority more shareable because several parties may participate in forming and sustaining government.
For Kenya, this could help transform political competition from an ethnic arithmetic into an ideal meritocracy.
The currency of national leadership would increasingly become parliamentary numbers, legislative competence, coalition-building ability and the persuasiveness of competing programmes.
It would also strengthen political parties.
Our constitution already envisages parties as national institutions. Article 91 requires political parties to have a national character, uphold national unity and practise internal democracy. It expressly prohibits parties founded on ethnic, religious, linguistic, racial or regional bases.
The Political Parties Act goes further by assigning parties responsibility for articulating public-policy priorities, shaping public policy and mobilising citizens to participate in political decisions. Kenya’s courts have similarly observed that requiring political parties to have an ideology would enhance our democracy.
Our constitutional aspiration, therefore, is already clear. The challenge is creating political incentives strong enough to make it real.
Under parliamentarism, a serious political party seeking to govern Kenya would have to win parliamentary seats across the country. It would need credible candidates in Mombasa and Meru, Nairobi and Nyamira, Turkana and Tana River. Its success would depend less upon the magnetism of one presidential candidate and more upon the quality of hundreds of candidates carrying a recognisable programme.
Parties would consequently have stronger incentives to answer ideological questions.
What is our economic philosophy? What is our position on taxation? What is our philosophy of social protection? How should healthcare be financed? What should be the relationship between national and county governments? What is our policy on education, enterprise, housing and employment?
Elections should become contests between competing answers to these questions.
A parliamentary system could also strengthen accountability. A government that loses the confidence of Parliament can be replaced without requiring the country to endure an entire presidential term or plunge immediately into another nationwide presidential contest. Government would depend continuously upon maintaining parliamentary confidence.
Kenya has, in fact, experienced an element of this
architecture before. Under the 2008 National Accord, the Prime Minister was
required to be an elected MP and parliamentary leader of the largest party, or
of a coalition commanding a majority. The arrangement emerged from exceptional
circumstances and should not simply be replicated, but it remains an important
part of our constitutional history.
None of this means parliamentarism is perfect.
Poorly designed parliamentary systems can produce unstable coalitions, excessive party fragmentation and governments preoccupied with political survival. Nor does changing constitutional architecture automatically eliminate ethnic politics. Research on electoral systems shows that institutional design interacts in complicated ways with ethnic diversity and party fragmentation.
That is precisely why Kenya should have a serious national conversation about the details: the electoral system, safeguards for minorities, the relationship between Parliament and the Executive, the role of the Senate, mechanisms for government formation and dissolution and the preservation and strengthening of devolution.
But the principle deserves consideration.
The constitution begins by
declaring that we are proud of our ethnic, cultural and religious diversity and
determined to live together as one indivisible sovereign nation. Our
institutions should give practical meaning to that promise.
No Kenyan should believe that his or her community must capture the presidency to belong at the centre of national power.
No child should grow up believing that the highest levels of leadership are statistically beyond reach because he or she was born into a smaller community.
And no political party should survive merely as an election vehicle assembled around the ambitions of an individual.
We should build institutions in which ideas compete, parties endure and leadership is earned through persuasion, performance and parliamentary confidence.
Kenya’s diversity should cease being treated as an electoral equation to be solved every five years. It should become the foundation upon which we construct a more representative democracy.
A parliamentary republic offers us an opportunity to move politics away from the question, “Who is our person?”
And towards the far more important question:
“Whose ideas can build the kenya we want?”
