Ban on demos will not create confidence in integrity of polls

Kenya Police officers and Government spokespersons are not paid to read philosophy. They don’t read people like David Henry Thoreau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon and the like. If they did, police bosses would not say the appalling things they are known to say. They would know that public protest against state driven injustice is real. They would also know protest against bad government is a civil right and a duty – a primary responsibility for every citizen. In 1849, Thoreau, the celebrated American political thinker, famously stated that individuals should never allow governments to overrule, or atrophy, their consciences. A person who surrenders his conscience to the dictates of an unjust government becomes an accomplice in the crime of bad government, he said. It is everyone’s duty to make sure government does not make him or her an agent of injustice.

From ancient antiquity right into our own times, unjust government orders have filled up oppressed persons with powerful death wishes. Such surrender to fate has traumatised whole societies, through avoidable social convulsions. Government spokesmen should know this. Yet, I don’t know whether they teach world history to police and military commanders who go on to speak for governments. If they do, then it should confound us to hear the police sending out sinister messages ahead of a General Election. For, the Kenya Police has this week warned Kenyans ahead of the August 8 General Election. They have said, “Anybody who rejects the election results will be arrested.” They have outlawed protest against election results, even before we go to the polls. In their messaging, they echo President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has been consistent in telling Kenyans that election results must be accepted.

Do these warnings prefigure something more sinister? What is it – if we may ask – that the President and the Kenya Police know, that people like me do not know? Do they already know the result of an election that has yet to take place? Why do they want this unknown result accepted even before we have seen the election? What are they pre-casting? I smell a rat. Should it turn out that President Kenyatta is declared to have lost the election, would he not have a right to reject the results if he thought he had not lost fairly? Would the Kenya Police arrest him? Or does he enter the race as the obvious winner? Is the messaging, therefore, calculated to intimidate a section of the population? If not, does any other Kenyan participating in the election, as a candidate or as a voter, not have the right to reject a flawed poll? We must ask again, what do they know that some of us do not know?

Rejecting defective things is a natural right. This includes rejecting defective elections. The right to protest and to picket is itself constitutional. This right is not given by the police, the President, or the government. It sits above everybody. Nor does the Constitution even attempt to say that election results are an exception to this sacrosanct right. The recent pronunciations from the Kenya Police are therefore illegal. The petition by the President that we should accept the results is, for its part, both untimely and ominous.

If we borrowed from D. H. Thoreau, therefore, we would say that every citizen has a duty to disobey the Kenya Police edict, if in his or her perception the election results will be worth rejecting. Metaphorically, Thoreau compared government to a machine. “If the machine is producing injustice,” he wrote, in the essay titled ‘On the duty of Civil Disobedience:’ “It is the duty of conscientious citizens to be a counter friction, that is to stop the machine.” Thoreau was quite clear that government is only an expediency. It exists as a means to a people’s end. He was also conscious of the reality that government is sometimes abused. And when government is abused, the abused citizens must correct the abuse by rejecting the government. This they do not just as a right, but also as sacred duty.

Earlier, the American Declaration of Independence had captured the ends for which governments are constituted among people. Simply put, governments exist to guarantee the people’s rights to life, liberty and happiness. Now nobody is going to be happy if government is imposed upon him or her through electoral fiction. To use police force to get citizens to accept electoral fiction is to foment social havoc.

But let me tell you about the police and Thoreau. Our mother Roselyn of Emanyulia hardly knows a thing about Thoreau. Yet she has often reminded us of the day in 1969 when she learnt that the police can only control people when the people accept the legitimacy to be controlled and, therefore, cooperate. In July 1969, Kenyans assembled at Nairobi’s Holy Family Basilica to attend Tom Mboya’s requiem mass. Mama Roselyn was among them. All hell broke lose when an angry woman flung her shoe at President Jomo Kenyatta. She was part of those who thought the government had had a hand in Mboya’s killing. In the ensuing fiasco policemen abandoned their branded “Utumishi Kwa Wote” cars, to take cover from an enraged public. Those in Utumishi uniform wanted to run naked in the streets.

Hell has no fury like an enraged citizenry. In our times, we have witnessed this reality in as diverse places as The Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti under Baby Doc (Jean-Claude Duvalier), Rumania under Nicolae Ceausescu and Cambodia under Pol Pot and his dreadful Khmer Rouge – to reflect on just a couple examples.

The inveterate hostility of government agencies against civil liberties has never won in the long run. Rather than issue threats and innuendo, the government and its agencies should create confidence in the integrity of the elections. As things stand, four months to the polls, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission seems to be getting more disorganised by the day. This is worrying.