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Go Kenya, we believe in you, we know you can deliver this election without violence

Thursday August 03 2017
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Kenyan voters participate in a mock voting as part of preparations for the August 8, 2017 General Election. PHOTO | STEVE NJUGUNA | NMG

By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

There is a book that was written back in the Clinton era in the United States that every political strategist, even in our own neck of the woods, should read. It is by Drew Westen, is titled Political Brain, with the subtitle “THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN DECIDING THE FATE OF THE NATION.”

Though Westen concerns himself chiefly with American politics, and is in fact talking mainly to the Democrats, the book is a guide to understanding what motivates voters to choose one candidate over another and how they go about weighing the positives and negatives of each candidate on offer in any polity.

The two competing influencers in political processes have always been recognised as rationality and emotion.

The former supposes that people will examine the options given by the political protagonists in a cool and dispassionate manner and make their choices after thinking through their preferences and what their consequences could be.

The latter will see the main influence coming from primary “thoughtless” emotion, passion and, quite often, “the psychology of the mob, inflamed by the moment, and capable of turning on anyone in its path.”

Voters are not always rational, although their irrationality is informed by real concerns that more sophisticated analysts may view as “primordial sentiments.”

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Westen suggests that in the absence of a perfect idyll of a “social contract,” people will tend to abandon Platonic reason and fall back on the less complex safety-nets of tribe, ethnicity, religion and race.

In our young “democracies”, if we may even call them that, what I read in Westen’s book makes sense. The states we put in place at Independence, and which we absentmindedly dubbed “republics” a year or so later, are laughable parodies of nation-states, lacking historical depth and bereft of organic cohesion and cohesiveness.

Having been cobbled together by forces that had uses they wanted to put us to, we have all too readily contented ourselves with sitting in the fetters decided for us by our enslavers and refused to set ourselves s free, except in very few cases.

Even after discovering ourselves in the other, in the reflections of ourselves in the ethnic affinities between our groups – which we may not have discovered before the white man came and roped us together—we still refuse to investigate, recover and validate those affinities for our collective advancement.

It is staggering to see the paucity of efforts deployed in the study of our ethnic formations, designed to tease out the linguistic and folkloric similarities that should be uniting us instead of dividing us. The counterintuitive narrative would be that the highest level of ethnic integration was achieved under the colonial regime.

But perish the thought, since what happened cannot be called integration, any more than cattle in a stockade can claim integration. But we are smarter than cattle – at least that is the theory – and we can do much more than they can even begin to contemplate. And from time to time, we display that smartness, even if our efforts are few and far between.

To move from where the colonial administration left us, we are called upon to undo the more nefarious aspects of the regime the wazungu bequeathed us, including ethnic enmity and rotten governance systems.

We need to craft new systems attuned to our needs and the needs of our successive generations still to come.

That is what the Kenyans did in 2010 when they gave themselves a new Constitution that has opened the doors to better and more effective governance systems. Their Constitution is easily the most forward looking in East Africa, and they have every right to be proud of that achievement.

The challenge is to fight for its fullest implementation, and that has been hindered by the fact that those who had opposed the process of writing it were charged with implementing it. No matter, it is in place and some of us have seen it as a possibility for us as well.

That progress must encourage Kenyans to go into the Nane Nane elections with confidence, knowing that they can achieve great things every time they raise themselves above ethnicised politics and other parochialisms. If they could deliver that Constitution, they can deliver anything. Without violence.

Go, Kenya, all the best in the election.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]

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