The Moral Hazard of Negotiating the Amended Polls Laws

The term "Moral Hazard" has been in use since the 17^th century and gained more prominence in the very recent Subprime Mortgage Crisis of 2008. Essentially, this is an economic phrase describing the lack of incentive to guard against risk by a party because the said party is protected from its consequences, e.g., if you keep bailing out banks using public money, they will engage in even riskier behaviour as their irresponsibility has been underwritten by the exchequer. It is time we introduced this phrase in our political discourse. The past week has witnessed drama in our National Assembly as MPs battled each other, literally, to pass the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2016. That the passage of the law was acrimonious is not in question. Our political discourse has been for a very long term adversarial. The bill is now headed to the Senate where again Jubilee has a majority, or a tyranny of numbers, as some would have it. There are no prizes for guessing in which way the Senate will vote. What is of interest to me and expressed in this article is the chorus from the opposition and now the clergy expressing fear that the amendments are a recipe for chaos. I beg to differ. The framework of violence was created by the antagonists of the political class and inadvertently cemented by the negotiators of the IEBC deal. I will explain.

The negotiations were put in play after one party, CORD, chose not to follow the constitutionally mandated resolution processes and sought a mechanism that involved violence, which we euphemistically call ‘peaceful demonstrations’. The Jubilee government chose to accept negotiations as they also had misgivings about some of those who were supervising elections. Integrity aspersions had been cast on one side, posits of innocence provided by commissioners and consensus reached. This was, in every sense, an ephemeral band-aid solution.