What’s wrong with our democracy

Democracy is a strange phenomenon. It allows politicians to manipulate the voters for their selfish gains. No one makes this point clearer than Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher. Remember the Greeks invented the concept of democracy. Socrates was a brilliant teacher.

Like a prophet, he was ahead of his people in wisdom and foresight. His methodology included enlightening the people through deductive analogy. He posed questions to the audience and asked them to answer them through reasoning and then made them understand what he intended to teach them.

To a group of his students, he once gave an analogy of two candidates; one was a doctor and the other a sweets’ shop owner.

The sweets’ shop owner said to the audience of voters regarding his rival, the doctor: “Look, this person here has worked many evils on you... he hurts you, gives you bitter portions and tells you not to eat and drink whatever you like.

“He’ll never serve you feasts of many and varied pleasant things like I will.” Then Socrates asked the audience to consider the response of the doctor: “Do you think the doctor would be able to reply effectively?” he asked.

The correct answer from the audience became that the doctor would have replied to the allegation by the sweet shop owner as follows. “I cause you trouble, and go against your desires in order to help you.”

This answer would have caused uproar among the voters, don’t you think? But most voters don’t really understand Socrates logical reasoning.

Instead, passion driven by interests that are not necessarily of value to them determine their decision. This ignorance by voters undermines the purpose of democracy.

By any standards, Kenya is considered an emerging democracy. Emerging because we have not perfected the art yet. That is why we are still discussing procedures for voting. Like; whether we should have manual or electronic registration or transmit ballot papers physically or send the results electronically using mobile phone technology. Every voter in Kenya knows that our election system is guided by the universal principle of one man, one vote. Our fear is not that people are not going to vote.

Voting will take place regardless of whether the turnout is high or not. After all, voting in Kenya is not compulsory, so I don’t know why politicians are busy enticing people to register. The civic education on voter education should be left to the IEBC and maybe the civic organisations.

Telling people to register and vote is not enough unless they are also educated on why they should vote. The average Kenyan has no clue what the strategic issues are. The only motivation that drives the majority of the voters is ethnicity; the principle of us-against-them that guides voters in Kenya.

But globally also, the ideals and the fundamentals of democracy seem to be losing meaning. What happened in America in November last year during the elections that saw Donald J. Trump get elected illustrates that people no longer care about rational issues.

The White American voters were subjected to large doses of fear of losing their privilege that saw them elect a man who in previous elections would never have come close to the gates of the White House.

We now need to revisit the purpose of democracy. As it is under the current system of fear, politics of ethnicity and voter buying will lead us nowhere.

If voters don’t have the motivation to vote except to bring one of their own to power, then the purpose of democracy is lost. In the Dialogues of Plato, the founding father of Greek philosophy, Socrates, is portrayed as being hugely pessimistic about democracy. Socrates’s point is that voting in an election is a skill, not a random intuition. And like any skill, it needs to be taught systematically to people.

Letting the citizenry vote without an education is as irresponsible as putting a drunk driver behind the wheels of a car and expecting him to arrive home safely.

From the fears by Socrates about the value of democracy, it is easy to see that we need to educate the voters in Kenya so that they are not like the voters in the analogy of the doctor and the sweets’ shop owner; who  would rather vote for a weak choice because their reasoning is limited or they have the memory of the Goldfish.

They don’t remember that like the sweets’ shop owner, politicians keep giving them ‘sweets’ that only give pleasure for a short time. And like the dogs in Pavlov’s experiments, voters can easily be enticed by dangling a piece of meat to condition them to react by reflex which means they don’t need to think but follow their reflex action. The ‘sweets’ thus become the motivation for voters to vote their preferred candidates.

However hard we try and make noise about poor governance structures in Kenya, nothing much will change. If the voters don’t understand the issues, then democracy by itself will have no meaning and voting every five years becomes merely a ritual.

Getting easy answers through populist politics leads to bad governance. Former President Daniel Arap Moi aptly put it: “Siasa mbaya maisha mbaya (bad politics leads to poor quality of life)”. Wasn’t he right?

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Democracy