Recent events in Kenya where the political establishment consolidated itself, bear resemblance to entrenched political dynasties consolidating themselves in Sri Lanka. But in Kenya there are tribes, and that’s a different story altogether. The closest thing you’d find in Sri Lanka is castes maybe, but the significance of class-politics has waned. Class-politics has taken over from where caste-politics left off, but there is nothing like the intensity of the political contestations that happen in Kenya, in this country.
The Kenyatta family in Kenya was, and the Odinga family etc. are supposed to be now, representing the political ‘establishment’ in that country, and the fact that the upstart Vice President William Ruto was able defeat Opposition Leader Raila Odinga was thought to be a bit of a coup. But the problem with Kenya is that elections are not sacrosanct.
They are far too close for the comfort of the candidates and the people of the country as well. This means that there is systemic failure in Kenya, that Sri Lankans would be foreign to.
This may sound strange considering all that this country has been through in the past few months, and the tensions wrought that put anything that happens in Kenya to shame. But that’s hardly the point. The systemic failures in Kenya are endemic, because if there is any election, chances are that it won’t be decisive and would lead to violence.
The last time there was a Presidential Election before the recent one in Kenya, violence broke out and the country was so destabilized that eventually the two dominant political clans had to come to an agreement for the sake of the country. This led to both the patriarchs of the two dominant political factions struggling for credibility among their own supporters, which meant that the situation further deteriorated, and politics became untenable for a while.
SHEEPISH
It’s hardly conceivable that one handshake between Kenyatta who represented one tribe and one political party, and Odinga who represented a different tribe and a different political camp, would lead to a situation in which the country’s politics becomes almost totally ineffectual. Yet that did happen. But the tribal dimensions are such in Kenya that one wonders whether its party politics and democracy that’s predominant, or tribal divisions.
This is like saying that Sri Lankan politics is decided based on whether the Royal College old boys do better with the voters than the St. Thomas’ College old boys. How damaging that that sort of calculus would be for democracy would be unimaginable? It’s as if there is a super-structure over the democratic structures that ostensibly obtains in the country, and decides on who governs and who gets left out.
But yet Kenyan democracy and democracies in many countries — some African and some Asian — have been like that. They have had democracy more or less as an outward appendage, but the countries have been essentially run on tribal lines. Some would say that ethno-religious politics operates on the same lines in Sri Lanka.
But politics didn’t become polarized fortunately in Sri Lanka on these lines, for the simple reason that there is a disparity in numbers. There are far more Tamils than there are Burghers for example, to put things in decidedly non-controversial terms.
But in any event the Kenyans must be feeling a little sheepish. Here they are having conducted an election after much speculation as to how the chips would fall politically, and on whether the President would be backing his Vice President or not.
But then the poll becomes irrelevant almost, because the main bone of contention for starters, becomes the election itself with the Elections Commission pulling to two sides and with one camp anointing the upstart, and another the dynastic candidate. This is not mere systemic failure, it is also evidence that there is a level of political immaturity in Kenya that would have been unthinkable in this country.
DETERIORATED
It’s a little bit of political naïveté as well for the President’s man Odinga to think that he would be able to shake hands with his rival — as he did after the last election controversy — because he does not like violence, and all would be well, and he would be able to win the new election. This sort of thing would not happen in Sri Lanka because politics is much more cut-throat frankly, and there is much more than rides on political allegiances and the manoeuvres that individual politicians are not so mellow as to shake hands and bury the hatchet, or for that matter to wait for the Election Commission to patch things up after a parting of ways.
In this country nothing usually lies on the balance in this way. Not that there would never be a close election, but it wouldn’t be such a regular occurrence, and moreover the stakes would be so high that things would be done with clinical precision. It’s a pity to watch a country that has that kind of political culture that worked with such precision, transformed into a state in which it was portrayed recently as one that was politically volatile and possessing a decaying political culture.
Hopefully, the Kenyans would make it through the current anxious times and the political impasse they are facing now, but either way the question would be whether the torch would pass from the powerful dynastic families to the politically experienced but non-establishment parties led by the less socially mobile tribes.
Sri Lanka has passed this stage long ago, (replacing the word dynasty for tribe there) but with the qualification that the more things change the more they stay the same. Powerful dynastic families have given way to other powerful dynastic families, and there is an entire dynastic network and structure that perpetuates clan-politics in this country.
Sri Lankans have also been able to escape international censure more than the Kenyans and the leadership of Kenya saw itself embroiled in war crimes litigation etc. The point being made isn’t that Sri Lanka is superior, but that Kenya lags behind in terms of institutional-framework and in terms of international recognition as a functioning democracy.
CREDIBILITY
Would Sri Lanka deteriorate to a point that the country becomes a Kenya? That is the recent consensus after the events of this year in particular of course. But being that our political culture is more advanced, what with elections not leading to regular or almost unerring cries of ‘foul play’ as in Kenya, it is unlikely that we would deteriorate and occupy a place that’s as bleak as Kenya’s when it comes to regular issues such as the legitimacy of Presidential Polls etc.
Just imagine that Raila Odinga has challenged the Presidential Elections in his country for the third time in a row. However Mr. Odinga has had some success in terms of his election petitions — in 2017, he was able to get the Elections Commission to have a rerun of the Presidential Election because it was determined that the process was flawed.
The Kenyan election apparatus has improved considerably since then, and other African countries such as Uganda and Tanzania are now looking to Kenya as an example of a country that is doing rather well in terms of election transparency, and credibility of the polling process.
Imagine that, in spite of this the latest Presidential Poll is now mired in all types of controversy. The people are looking to the Supreme Court of Kenya to bring some kind of closure to the current drama, but they also want justice done. It’s not a great place to be in, and sometimes one wonders how the system survives at all and does not implode and morph into a dictatorship or worse.
However what obtains in Kenya has been called totalitarianism by default. For instance when Mr. Daniel Arap Moi’s election was challenged somewhere in 2010, the Court could not serve papers on him even though an election petition was filed, because physically serving papers on the elected president was not possible due to the fact that constitutionally he ‘enjoyed special status.’
The law was an instrument to serve Mr. Moi’s totalitarianism, a prominent Kenyan lawyer was heard to say at that time. This is Kenya, and we have to guard our own institutions for obvious reasons, if we are to judge favourably as we do now, in terms of contrast.
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