By Jenny Luesby

Imagine a game, played by leaders from 42 countries, where citizens only care that their ‘man’ wins, because the country that wins gets to dominate all the others. It’s a game with just one set of winners: and a vast majority of losers.

It’s also a game built to create a disenfranchised majority, which will form alliances, which will strike to break away from the game’s rules and outcomes, and which will even despise the numbers game that subjugates them.

Dangerous game

In short, it’s a dangerous game: which is why Kenya voted in a new constitution.

The point was that power would be spread and shared, that the one man who wins the presidency wouldn’t drive all decision-making, and all appointments. It was a structure built to ensure that all the 42 who play win self-determination and equity: it was a game changer.

The game is no longer ‘winner takes all’. Yet as we approach the big test, it becomes clear that there were two things about the structure of the old-style Kenyan elections that made them lethal, and we have only solved one of them.

The constitution has given us a power-sharing structure. But it didn’t give us a power-sharing mindset.

And that’s a problem that no amount of executive restructuring can cure. For so long as individual Kenyans cannot find it in their hearts to vote for the most outstanding policies, and the most outstanding leader, and think the point is only to get a man of ‘my tribe’ into the top spot, we are set on a race to destruction.

Because disappointment will prevail: real or imagined, it will be our post-election.

And that outcome is a given.

There is not one of the eight candidates standing for the presidency that is of the same tribe as an out-and-out majority of Kenyans. And only one candidate can win.

There isn’t even another path: the only way to get beyond having one person at the top of our government is by ceasing to have a single nation state. For which reason, we who live in the most concentrated ethnic diversity of any land in Africa simply have to come to terms with the ethnicity of our president.

Raw nerve

The power sharing seemed to hold so much hope on that score. But the signs now are bad. Our leaders are beginning to stir our sense of injustice. And justice hasn’t served the people of Kenya well. Indeed, can there be any nerve that is more raw, and any appeal that is more powerful, than suggesting we are being wronged, or cheated?

It will spill blood if our politicians go down this path again.

As tensions rise, and get stirred, people will start to forget that a Kamba single mother is living the same struggle in the same nation as a Meru single mother, and that an unemployed Luhya youth is no more and no less our son than an unemployed Kisii youth.

Tribal ascendancy

However you look at it, this mania for having the president come from our own tribal alliance cannot bring us a developed future. If it forced court cases, or fanatical election monitoring, it would anyway be a shackle we needed to free ourselves from in order to rise.

But in our case, we all know that it doesn’t play out in peaceful protest or institutionalized challenges. It sets one Kenyan on another, each seeking what?

When a Kenyan slashes at a 6-year-old boy’s head with a machete, does it make maize cheaper? When we pull the father of three out of his home and batter him to death in the ditch outside, does it make our lives better? The point of the burning is what? Is the aim to all obliterate each other? Will some of you who read this today, maybe many of you, lose brothers and cousins, and children and wives, for this problem we have about being a nation? As it is, with our minds once again set on tribal ascendency, what measures are even being put in place to deal with all the disappointed?

In recent days, European ambassadors were urging for voter education. It was education the IEBC took tenders on last year. But with fewer than 30 days to go, and no voter education yet planned, how are we meaning to get this, our society, to deal with the actual election result?

It’s not as if that child, laughing today, but dead in 6 weeks’ time, had anything to do with it. He won’t even vote. The fathers, sisters, cousins set to die if we cannot deal with any outcome of majority rule may none have them voted either.

Whosoever wins the presidency will be a Kenyan. They will win only one post of many. We rebuilt our government to end the game that wasn’t fair - no matter which leader wins the most votes in the very top spot.

So now we had better get used to the idea of power sharing too, and get ready for it: together.

Or we can get ready to burn. Because our only choices are one or the other. Sharing Kenya, or burning Kenya.

The writer is Group Content and Training Editor at The Standard Group.

 jluesby@standardmedia.co.ke