Shelve BBI, and the 2022 elections will be 'stolen'

President Uhuru Kenyatta and ODM leader Raila Odinga publicly reconciled and agreed to work together in the interest of Kenyans. [Willis Awandu, Standard]

It seems that the much-talked-about BBI referendum is progressively getting mired down.

That should worry us. Why? Because should the BBI Amendment Bill be aborted, there will be claims of a stolen election in 2022.

We will then head to the Supreme Court, and there could be a rerun. I say this with certainty because all elections under the current Constitution have been ‘stolen’, and the stalemate has always ended up in the Supreme Court. 2022, sans BBI, will be no different.

That is why I disagree with Makueni Governor Kivutha Kibwana’s latest statement on Twitter that changing the Constitution now is unrealistic.

He could have been echoing Governor Wycliffe Oparanya’s early March position that the BBI referendum is not tenable before 2022.

That aside, it is clear that BBI is facing trouble. It’s in public domain that the joint Parliament and Senate BBI committee is divided. The ODM minority leaders in both houses, James Orengo in Senate and John Mbadi in Parliament are arguing about whether to introduce commas and full stops in the BBI document. While the way you interpret these political cues is your business, let me pursue my initial hypothesis.

Who has been stealing the election and why will it be stolen in 2022? Hold your horses because I am talking about perception — that affective domain of any election! Notably, the BBI reggae has already created a perception that it is meant to end electoral fraud, ethnic contest and post-election violence, among other ‘terrestrial evils’.

Although this ‘pacification’ will come at a heavy cost of an additional 70 MPs, the premier, and two deputy premier positions, we have been convinced that the cost of going to 2022 elections without BBI will be huge. The amendment Bill was sold to Kenyans as the panacea to usher the country into the era of political peace to guard our political soul.

There lies the danger, and here is an anecdote of how risky perceptions are. In Ecclesiastes, there is a story of a city where a few men lived peacefully. A powerful king besieged it.

In the town lived a poor wise man, who used his wisdom to deliver the city from the killer king. But no one rewarded the poor man afterwards. He was forgotten.

The knowledge of a poor man is despised. That’s the perception. Moral of this story: As long as there is a perception regarding our elections, it’s not yet uhuru. That’s why stopping reggae isn’t wise.

Here is an example of how a perception is institutionalised. In an interview recently, DP William Ruto tried to convince journalist Linus Kaikai that in 2017, UhuRuto’s Jubilee won the election ‘fair and square’.

However, Kaikai interjected quickly: ‘But we all know that the elections were nullified? The journalist could not carry the burden of allowing Ruto to revise political perception on national television.

The approach was justified because the current Constitution was created out of political avarice. It was first a crisis— Kibaki was serving his last term. He wanted a legacy. Raila Odinga, a partner in Kibaki’s second term, was preparing for Joshuaite Canaan.

There was no time — it was a crisis, and some committee of experts compiled a document.

Foreign partners branded it the most progressive. But now we know that this was an international constitutional flirtation! My word count is over.

- Dr Ndonye is a Political Economist of Communication