The choice is your own on Thursday

The Daily Nation
Story by PHILIP OCHIENG
Publication Date: 12/23/2007

The secret is that I will not vote on Thursday. But let me not discourage you. Do use your "democratic right" to enter the ballot kiosk. My only warning is the usual one.

Do not vote with any illusion because, if you do, your disappointment will be profound. But perhaps I am wrong. For it happens again and again. After every five years, we even kill one another in confrontations over individuals -- called "candidates" -- with skins thicker than a pachyderm’s.

Perhaps, then, it happens because we ourselves (the electorate) have become hippos and elephants. Ritualised masochism. We have suffered this ritualised masochism for so long that we no longer even feel the pain. With murderous enthusiasm that puts the Aztecs in the shade, we participate, every so often, in the bloodbath of electing those who are to skin us alive for the next five years. We are like the black American woman who had romanticised Africa so deeply that, upon visiting it for the first time and attending an Asantehene ceremony in Ghana, she was so impressed that she never saw the despotism and fleecing beneath the veneer of colour and unction. So she hurrahed: "All that soul!"

That’s right. We elect our MPs merely for the "soul" which enables the ritual to block our very kinaesthetic pathways of thought. We venerate Parliament because the swagger of its formalities has succeeded in fully benumbing and blocking all our collective faculty of judgment of what is right and wrong.

And so, ever since Britain saddled us with it as a psychedelic garment for "democracy," no Kenyan – not even the most learned – has ever questioned whether it is objectively legitimate. None has ever asked why a poor nation squanders such wealth into putting together what is but the nation’s next lot of lecherous drones.

For you don’t need to be Isaiah to predict that the next parliament will not better your life even by an iota. The cinch is that, even if we vote out all members of the last parliament, their replacements will be equally worthless collective goals -- nay, equally injurious. You don’t need to be Jeremiah to see that the Tenth Parliament will be equally unconcerned about our crushing wants.

The new MPs will be equally shameless in their rush to line their pockets. They will be equally cultureless in their wallowing in social ignorance. Social ignorance. The nagging question is: Why do we do it? Why can’t we learn a lesson as salient as this from a history as recent as when President Kibaki dissolved the Ninth Parliament and Samuel Kivuitu named December 27 as the date on which to "elect" the next one?

Ecclesiastes the Preacher does not supply the physic. But at least he diagnoses the disease: "Wisdom cries out in the street and no man regards it." Why? Because we have all been intellectually "wired" into the assumption that Parliament is a necessary cog in the wheel of democracy.

Of course, it can be. But how can MPs be the angels in a generally corrupt society? So, in the absence of a restraining authority, they just cannot be apostles of good government. Where the executive branch abandons that duty, parliament can degenerate into an active instrument of tyranny.

Indeed, because many new MPs will be relatively poor, they will be tempted to support every legislative effort to subvert democracy by looting the Treasury – whereas the opposite is the task of the legislative branch, namely, to ensure that the executive branch is spending public resources with frugality.

That is the urgent question.

Where the legislative fails to do this – and even takes its own initiative to channel those resources into the bank accounts of individuals – how exactly does Parliament serve our collective interests? In two ways – or so we are told. One is that we need representation in the making of laws. The other is that Parliament is a handy mechanism for appointing ministers.

But, clearly, those are not answers. What laws? And why do we need ministers? What is the use making any laws when Parliament and the executive themselves are the first to break those laws?

In some systems, a minister may make a difference in his section of national development. Everybody can see the Transport minister’s contribution to our traffic development. The number of skulls broken on our roads is rising with the nip and tuck of the matatu. All other ministers make similar contributions to the bone-crushing industry.

Thus, by entering the ballot hut, the voter is faced with a cruel choice – between the horned devil and the deep blue sea.

Since I prefer neither the devil nor Charybdis in the Pelasgic sea, I will not vote. But it is a free country and the choice is your own.