The management of diversity pertains to how the different social groups
in a country are made to feel about their place and belonging in the
polity. FOTOSEARCH
So Kenyans have been back to the polls as ordered by their
country’s Supreme Court when it annulled the August presidential
elections.
In the winner-takes-all democracy that most
of the countries in East Africa have chosen, in which winning is the
most important outcome for all contending groups, little if any energy
is ever spent on thinking about the impact a particular election or
political process may have on such things as national unity, social
cohesion and on efforts to build an inclusive and accountable state.
Kenyans
like talking up their country as truly democratic. Those given to
overstatement call it “the most democratic country in this region.”
One
hears these claims from ordinary and not-so-ordinary Kenyans when they
are interviewed on international electronic media, never mind that some
of the interviews take place against the backdrop of political events
that question these very assertions.
Since the August
elections were annulled, prominent Kenyans, politicians included, have
made such assertions as “Kenya is not a banana republic,” presumably
like other East African countries are, and others such things as “Kenya
is not a benevolent dictatorship where presidents win 99 per cent of the
vote.”
This is not the place to get into which such
assertions are valid. Suffice it to say that a close look at how
politics is organised and practised by Kenya’s political elite shows
that attempts to portray it as worlds apart from the rest of the region
disregard much that it has in common with its immediate and
not-so-immediate neighbours.
The sole exception here
is Rwanda where, much as many casual observers and commentators may want
to deny it, genuine attempts have been made since the end of the civil
war and the Genocide Against the Tutsi, to organise and practise
politics in ways that have gone a long way towards helping tackle
longstanding internal challenges.
The challenges the
Rwandans saw it imperative to tackle directly and decisively include
management of power by those to whom it is entrusted; management of
social diversity; and the management and deployment of national
resources.
The challenge of managing power pertains to
whether those individuals or organisations that have it are willing to
not monopolise it, but to share it with others in order to minimise
contestations.
In Kenya as in Uganda, Tanzania and
Burundi, politics that allows winners to take everything and that keeps
losers out of decision-making for as long as they fail to win, is at the
centre of the controversies that bedevil every electoral contest and
undermine national cohesion.
The management of
diversity pertains to how the different social groups in a country are
made to feel about their place and belonging in the polity. Here in East
Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, colonialism bequeathed us
societies that were more likely to be internally antagonistic than
cohesive.
In only a few instances did post-colonial
political elites not compound the antagonism, not least by seeking to
win and retain power by playing different groups against each other.
When
competitive multiparty politics returned to the continent after one-man
military and civilian dictatorships became unfashionable, it entrenched
rather than cured the antagonisms, and in some cases catalysed them.
If
in much of the region, Kenya included, party politics resembles tribal
warfare, it is because of the failure to manage diversity through
deliberate inclusion and consensus building about issues that really
matter for the purposes of nation building.
The issue
of managing and deploying national resources is about how all citizens
get to enjoy their fair share of national resources. Winner-takes-all
politics almost invariably leads to some groups enjoying privileged
access to national resources while others do without, courtesy of the
political choices they make, or their ability to make demands in ways
that compel the powers that be to respond appropriately.
If
even in countries that are well endowed with resources, there are
groups or regions that suffer deprivation, it is because of failure to
resolve questions pertaining to how best to share the national cake, and
this has everything to do with how politics is organised and practised.
It has little if anything to do with whether in
procedural terms a country is democratic because it holds elections on a
regular basis and those elections are highly contested and often
subject to evaluation in terms of their quality by independent courts of
law.
As Kenyans headed back to the polls, the
question observers were asking themselves was what chances the elections
presented to the country and its citizens for resolving the really
important questions of to how power ought to be exercised, what ought to
be done to build a more inclusive, cohesive and fairer society, and
ultimately how to ensure that national resources are managed and
deployed for the benefit of everybody regardless of political and other
differences. Above all else, this is what democracy should be about.
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.com
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