Kenya's Greatest Gamble Yet

Last Sunday, the Daily Nation bravely shone a spotlight on the gambling craze that is sweeping the nation. Sports betting has taken the country by storm. Since 2013 when the first online sports betting company, SportPesa, was registered, the Betting Control and Licensing Board has awarded similar licenses to nearly 30 other bookmakers. The industry today has a turnover of Ksh 2.1 billion which is expected to nearly triple over the next three years.

Yet, as with all gambling, this is not just a good news story about company profits. The fact is those profits are made on the back of broken dreams and crippled lives. While the touted image is the beaming face of a winner holding his big cheque, rarely seen are the millions of losers and the toll gambling addiction is taking on families across the country.

In February, the director of communications at SportPesa, Kester Shimonyo, told the Nation that people “should bet for fun but it should not be taken as a fulltime economic activity”. However, taking a chance on the wheel of fortune has been a national activity for a long time. 

Government has been turned into a looting machine which has destroyed the meritocratic basis of our political economy. Get-rich-quick schemes of the politically connected have undermined the utility of education, skills and character as guarantors of success has been severely undermined.

Today, in public affairs, what matters is the lottery of who you know, rather than the certainty of what. In today’s Kenya, where your last name can, in the words of Kalonzo Muyoka, “betray you”, and where values can be a liability, what does it matter the qualifications you hold, or knowledge or integrity you have?

The declaration earlier this week by Commissioners of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission that they were willing to resign office was also the culmination of yet another a high stakes gamble of the sort that all too frequently seem to be the preferred way to run public affairs. It has been obvious to anyone who cared to look that public confidence in both the Commission and its Commissioners, the bedrock upon which any credible and peaceful election would rest, had long since eroded away. Opinion surveys have shown that citizens across political and ethnic divides had an increasingly dim view of the IEBC with nearly half of respondents in one poll saying the body could not be trusted to handle the 2017 election.

Yet despite this and through weekly public protests called by the opposition beginning April in which several Kenyans died or were brutalized at the hands of the police, and in which many businesses were looted, the Commissioners sat put and refused to budge. Talk of their resigning was peremptorily brushed aside even when the inevitability of their removal became plain. It was clear, like the many other Kenyans staking their lives and fortunes on the turn of a soccer match, the IEBC commissioners were betting on the outcome of the political match between the ruling Jubilee and opposition CORD coalitions.

Like their fellow gamblers, they do not see their future as dependent on their personal performance (already soiled by the failures during the 2013 election), or on their integrity, but on the games played by politicians.

Now following their resignation, Kenya will now embark on her greatest gamble yet. For 3 years, we have ignored the need to comprehensively reform our electoral system. Everything is broken: from the voter register to the petitions system, especially as regards challenges to the Presidential election. We have done little to mitigate the weaknesses exposed by past elections, to acquire the requisite technology and making necessary changes to the law. Party nominations remain fraught with cheating and violence and attempts to regulate campaign finance have hit a brick wall. 

Now, with a year to go to the 2017 polls, we find ourselves forced to make fundamental changes. It is doubtful that there will be enough time for anything other than “minimum” reforms followed by a roll of the dice and many prayers for peace. 

This nation of inveterate gamblers, which has since independence placed similar wagers with disastrous consequences, will once again stake its future, not on its skill and knowledge, but on the games played by its politicians.

And just as with the sports betting, on election day the images of the election will be the beaming politicians and voters' purple-stained fingers, not the rage and disappointment resulting from an election with little public faith.

In many ways, Kenya has been playing with matches and riding her luck. Yet we are storing up terrible trouble for the day our luck runs out.

Why This Is Not An IPPG Moment

Kenya today finds itself in the throes of a crisis. In the run up to next year’s scheduled general election, weekly opposition protests and the subsequent brutal crackdown, have deeply polarized the country and left at least three people dead and many others, including police officers, wounded. Though now suspended, a threat to restart the demonstrations if dialogue doesn’t happen still hangs in the air. But beyond the rhetoric, the teargas and the scenes of bloody confrontation, this is above all a crisis of memory and imagination.

We have been here before.  Almost every election in the multiparty era has been preceded by protests and demands for reform. The contestation has mainly been about two questions: the rules governing elections; and who sets and administers them. The latter question is the immediate spark for the current weekly demonstrations with demands for the reconstitution of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. However, in the background, and sadly barely mentioned, lurks the even more critical issue of wider reforms to the electoral system.

Nearly two decades ago, as the country prepared for another election, near identical scenes of protest over the composition of the then Electoral Commission of Kenya elicited a vicious response from the Nyayo government led to the deaths of 13 protesters on Saba Saba day in 1997 and the formation of the Inter Parties Parliamentary Group which negotiated a raft of reforms. These allowed the country to proceed to the polls later that year.

In our collective memory, the IPPG process was as a seminal moment during which the autocratic President Daniel Arap Moi was forced to accede to the people’s demand for change. George Kegoro, in March described it as “an elite platform that Kenyan political actors and civil society crafted in 1997 to save the country from the disaster that might have resulted from a threatened opposition boycott of the General Election of that year”. 

There are many parallels with today’s impasse including the threat by the opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy to boycott the 2017 elections if the IEBC is not replaced. Given that, many are citing the IPPG as a model for resolution. “It is time for another IPPG-like moment in Kenya,” as Mr Kegoro presciently wrote. The insistence by the governing Jubilee coalition and its supporters that Parliament is the appropriate forum for resolving the dispute can also be seen in this light.

However, this telling ignores a few inconvenient facts of history. The IPPG was not crafted by the opposition ad civil society to save Kenya. On the contrary, it was, as Rok Ajulu described in the New England Journal of Public Policy, “a KANU platform … designed to blunt the impact of the reform agenda of the opposition and its allies in the National Convention Executive Council [the civil society coalition that had spearheaded demands for change].” The NCEC correctly saw the IPPG as a tool “to cool the fire raised by the … the demands of the country for electoral reform, and in the process to legitimise the Moi re-election machine," and opposed it.

While the IPPG achieved some reforms, including allowing the opposition a role in appointing ECK commissioners, it was ultimately betrayed and many of the negotiated reforms were not enacted into law following the early dissolution of Parliament. Moi’s successor as President, Mwai Kibaki, would a decade later rubbish the very agreement he had had a hand in negotiating as a non-binding “gentleman’s agreement” and ignore it when appointing ECK commissioners, fatally undermining the ECK’s credibility and setting the country on the path to the 2008 post-election crisis.

Many of the arguments we hear from government types today in favour of a Parliamentary process are a rehash of Moi’s justification for using Parliament, the “legitimate representative of the people” as a means to exclude the citizenry. They highlight the question at the heart of the push for constitutional transformation which, despite the 2010 constitution, we have failed to resolve: Is reform to be a people-driven or state-driven process?

 This is evident in the continuing delegitimization of the street as a proper avenue for political participation and the idea that state institutions are the only acceptable forums for political negotiations. We see it when Boniface Mwangi’s peaceful demonstrations are violently dispersed and hear it when the government attempts to arrogate to itself the power to determine where and when protests can happen.

It is this collective failure to imagine alternative spaces where national questions can be debated and resolved by inclusive collections of wananchi, and not just by politicians or public officials, that is at the root of many of the state’s current legitimacy problems. Sadly, our political processes continue to be more concerned with solving the problems of politicians rather than those of the people.

Going forward, we must insist that any talks on fixing the electoral system not be sequestered in Parliament or participation limited to politicians. This is Kenya’s problem, not Raila Odinga’s or Uhuru Kenyatta’s. We must demand an inclusive national dialogue involving a wide array of stakeholders, including organized civil society and academics. These groups were major drivers for the 1997 “No Reforms, No Election” movement that was locked out of Moi’s IPPG talks. It is time they helped us finish what they started.