Why should Kenyans fund party primaries?

There’s a political question looming over our heads as we head to the elections; that of party primaries and who will fund them.

At the launch of his party, Jubilee leader President Uhuru Kenyatta announced that ‘they’ would look for funds for their nomination exercise. Weeks later majority leader Aden Duale seems to have interpreted ‘looking for money’ to mean getting it from public coffers, meaning that you, ladies and gentlemen, would be funding this process.

Since then mind boggling figures in their billions have been thrown around, with many wondering whether the other parties would follow suit with similar request.

Granted, some analysts argue that democracy is expensive, and that you dear tax payer, should be prepared to shoulder this burden.

But wait a minute, don’t we already fund Jubilee, alongside the other major political parties? Just the other day it emerged that you the taxpayer had given the three major political parties nearly half a billion shillings in the last financial year. Shouldn’t they at least draw the nomination budget from these funds? Why the need for more public money? After all, all aspirants will be required to part with hefty sums to even take part in these nominations.

If we, as a nation believe that this is such an important exercise that we should be funding, then perhaps shouldn’t we also fund the party primaries of all registered parties in Kenya too?

After all, the small party of today could be the dominant party of tomorrow in our ever dynamic political scene. But there are even bigger questions to consider.

We are still reconstituting the IEBC, the selection panel is racing against time to ensure that we get commissioners in place in good time to manage the August 2017 elections.

Do we really want to bog down the secretariat with an exercise that is largely outside their core mandate? What time will they have to focus on August 8^th? And can you imagine if those nominations degenerate into the kind of chaos we typically see every election year? Will it be the same IEBC left cleaning up the mess with just months to a general election?

Come on, Kenya – we have to decide what we want. We have made a mess of our electoral process and the reconstitution of the IEBC is only the latest symptom. We can’t dare create any more uncertainties!

That’s My Take

@YvonneOkwara