What type of strong political parties do we need?

Kenyans want a strong party, some say, like Kanu. This is an idea prevalent within CORD and Jubilee coalitions. It is also an idea that betrays confusion over what it means to have a strong party. Was Kanu really a strong party?

Party strength is multi-dimensional. Parties can be considered strong on the basis of their membership (raw head count) and grassroots reach (number of branches and officeholders). Strength can also be measured by the extent to which rank and file party members (who are not political office holders) control the elected officials (politicians). Lastly, we can measure party strength by the extent to which its elected political leadership has control over other elected officials (party discipline).

The performance of a party on these different dimensions has serious political implications.

Take the example of party control over elected politicians. South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) has significant control over policy and elected officials – including the president. This enabled the party to remove a sitting president from office (Thabo Mbeki) and, more recently, reverse Jacob Zuma’s decision to fire his finance minister. There is also the case of our own Kanu under Moi whereby the party was controlled from the top, especially after the “Njonjo affair” and the snap election of 1983. From then on Kanu headquarters (i.e the president) run the party at the expense of district party leaders and other elected politicians. This is when Kanu really became “baba na mama” of Kenyan politics.

It was also a time that saw the decline of Kenya’s key institutions – especially Parliament and the Judiciary. A “strong” party in Kanu allowed the president to keep all elected officials and party leaders in check through dubious party institutions like the disciplinary committee. The loss of intra-elite accountability within the party meant that while hundreds of thousands of Kenyans held party cards (thereby making Kanu a “mass party”), the party was really just Moi and his chosen coterie of party leaders in Nairobi. Everyone else had to fuata Nyayo. It was nothing like the ANC.

And so the question we should be asking CORD and Jubilee leaders is: what kind of strong party do they want? Do they want parties that are completely controlled by the party leaders; or do they want genuine participatory institutions that will allow full participation by all Kenyans and interest groups? Do they want an ANC or a Kanu?

It is also important to reconsider whether having strong national parties is a good idea, to begin with. Are strong national parties the antidote to our caustic ethnic politics?

The reason I ask is because the practicalities of forming national parties out of Nairobi mean that we will have parties like CORD and Jubilee that have a national reach, yes, but are known to belong to certain regions and communities. Such parties would still be ethnic parties.

A better strategy might be to aggregate from the counties up. What if parties formed in Kirinyaga could team up with their counterparts from Homa Bay, Elgeyo Marakwet, Garissa, and elsewhere?

This is not a trivial question. If the goal is to form non-ethnic parties, then we necessarily need to demonstrate real inter-ethnic party relations at the grassroots. There is no reason, beside ethnicity, why any of Kenya’s big five ethnic groups should belong to one party. Within them they all have objective economic bases for ideological differences. Therefore, the only reason they vote in one bloc is because we have national ethnic parties. With this in mind, efforts by governors to form new parties may not be such a bad thing, after all.