Presidential ‘democracy’, political parties are uneasy bedfellows

The so-called “presidential democracy” is antithetical to political parties. The two cannot coexist. They are uneasy bedfellows. And Kenyans since 1964 have lived to experience this.

Yet political parties, where they operate in a political culture that nurtures them and gives room for active participation in choosing political leaders and managers of state power, have historically become indispensable midwives for democratic governance. The German Federal Republic after the Second World War and the defeat of fascism is a perfect example of this.

Mwalimu Julius Nyerere led Tanganyika to independence under a multi-party system but soon argued that Africa had no need for “football democracy” that multi-party systems entailed. After 20 years of trying to nurture democracy and development in Tanzania, Nyerere gave up on the one-party Tanzanian constitution which, according to him, gave him so much powers that were he to use them all, he would have been the worst dictator on earth! So democratic politics requires, and nurtures, political pluralism, including multi-party politics.

That was Nyerere: the benevolent, philosophical, reflective, humane, social democratic African leader in the hue of Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore or Abraham Lincoln of the Gettysburg Address.

But very few individuals rise to the presidency in so-called presidential democracies with the mind, mentality or political predisposition of the Nyereres of this world. If anything, their hearts are full of wanting to settle yesterday’s political scores, to stride the stage of political power like colossi, and to “privatise” the management of public affairs to themselves.

As George Bernard Shaw once observed, in every political system, we need to be governed and yet to control our governors! So-called “presidential democracies” have proven, through experience, that it is very difficult to control presidents once they are sworn into office.

They immediately begin sailing into a stratosphere of political power that only sycophants and the “fathers of holiness” can reach. Other earthlings must become ‘kneel before me’ citizens who beg for their rights rather than claim such rights.

I beg to defend political parties as the only guarantors of nurturing democracy in a parliamentary system of government. “Presidential democracy”, on the other hand, of necessity destroys, subjugates, domesticates, privatises and stifles political parties as a condition of the success and so-called stability of their rule.

Our own history is a perfect illustration of this.

In 1963, when Kenya got independence, it was a multi-party democracy with Jomo Kenyatta as the Prime Minister and leader of the ruling party, the Kenya African National Union (Kanu) and its allies in Parliament. Gideon Ronald Ngala was the leader of the opposition political party, the Kenya African Democratic Party (Kadu) also with its allies in Parliament.

Right from the independence-day celebrations on December 12, 1963, all Kenyans, Kanu and Kadu followers alike, were buoyant and happy that the nation was being born. I was there at the celebrations on that night of December 12 as the Duke of Edinburgh lowered the Union Jack with the melody “God Save the Our Gracious Queen” being played by the army band.

Soon after that Jomo Kenyatta raised the new Kenyan national flag, designed with symbols and colours of struggle, defence, sacrifice, prosperity, justice, peace and freedom, as a Kenyan choir sang the new Kenyan national anthem: “O God of All Creation.”

Kenyan choir 

That Kenyan choir comprised students from the Alliance High School and the Alliance Girls High School, trained by Washington Omondi, Graham Hyslop and Johnson Kalume, the composer of the anthem. I was part of that choir, singing in the bass team. I have, therefore, deeply cherished our democracy and its architects and players in political parties and the parliamentary system of government.

It was very unfortunate that the so-called “national unity”, almost exclusive of democracy, immediately became the clarion call of the Kanu leaders as we started to rule ourselves. Jomo Kenyatta, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Tom Mboya, the key architects of Kanu, were at the forefront of claiming that multiple political parties, in the African context, were antithetical to democracy.

They started to systematically lure Kadu backbenchers to join Kanu. They succeeded. They then offered some Kanu bigwigs some roles in government, here and there, including occupying ministerial posts. Even Moi and Ngala swallowed this bait: Kadu only awaited formal dissolution as an opposition. And this did not take long to come.

By the time Tom Mboya, the then secretary-general of Kanu and able Minister for Planning and National Development was launching Kanu’s development platform and ideological treatise, Sessional Paper No. 10 and its Application to Planning in Kenya in 1965, the real Kanu leadership had been reduced to a tribal cabal of Kenyatta’s confidantes who ruled largely from State House and Gatundu, Kenyatta’s village in Kikuyuland.

Mboya tried to tame this “clannism”, as he called it, by mobilising the young members of Parliament and trade unionists to his side.

Odinga then came out as the most erudite critique of the “emerging authoritarianism” in Kanu, driving Kenyatta to close ranks with Mboya and plot Odinga’s eviction from the party with his cabal of “communists”. Factionalism was now ripe in both Kanu and Kadu, and the only “cohesive element” around which politicians could rally was the presidency: Jomo Kenyatta.

The so-called nationalist coalition that Kanu was had degenerated into the politics of “cabalism” and “factionalism”, the twin brothers of tribalism or what Mboya used to call “ethnic particularism”. The eviction of Odinga from Kanu at the famous Limuru Conference in 1965 to consolidate the emerging presidential authoritarianism simply concluded the chapter of saying goodbye to vigorous party politics in independent Kenya. Odinga’s belated attempts to form the Kenya People’s Union (KPU) and galvanise the forces of the left in defending participatory democracy did not impress Kenyatta and Mboya, who frustrated KPU in all ways possible, including detaining its leaders and banning it altogether.

Second liberation

Kenya became a one-party system de facto from then on until June 9, 1982, when the constitution was changed, making Kenya a single party state de jure. This move ignited the beginning of the struggle for multi-party politics, or the struggle for the Second Liberation that triumphed in November 1991 when Parliament abolished the notorious Section 2A of the Constitution that had legalised the single party state.

Sometimes I feel that it is only those of us who were involved in this struggle who feel passionately against so-called presidential democracy. The aura of the presidency, the power of the president to be able to do almost anything and not be touched by any restraint put on him by the law, cannot lead anybody to think that there can ever be anything democratic associated with leaving the destiny of a nation in the hands of such a system. We continue to see the horrors of the presidential system even under the multi-party state.

The Prime Minister, leading a government put in power by a majority of voters after free and fair elections, cannot possibly think of behaving like the possible dictator that Nyerere thought he would be, were he to use all the powers that the Tanzanian constitution bestowed on him. Moi, on the other hand, used all and added new ones of his own making.

When Kenyans went into the street celebrating the “second independence” that greeted the election of the the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) government in December 2002, little did they know that it was just a matter of time before “presidential democracy” would swallow its children and open its doors to the subversion of the people’s popular power. 

By the end of 2003, the broad national democratic coalition, like the one that had propelled Kanu to power earlier in 1963, was thrown to the winds as a small cabal of ethnic conspirators consolidated power around the presidency to entrench his authoritarian rule.

But the forces of reform were strong and had hegemony among the popular masses. Kibaki, on the other hand, was always at heart a liberal democrat of the Nyerere hue, and resisted being turned into a political demigod. He was not averse to progressive reforms but was too weak in health to stand against his close advisers who were intent on restoring presidential authoritarian rule.

The referendum of November 2005 benefited from Kibaki’s “neither hot nor cold” attitude to reforms, and the progressive forces within Narc, opposed to the draft constitution that more or less sanitised the old order, voted against it and triumphed with the support of 58 per cent of the population.

It is this 58 per cent that formed the basis of the new opposition party coming out of Narc and called the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). 

The threat to the existence of ODM has always been presidential elections. At every election since 2007 (2013, 2017 and 2022), splinter groups have emerged gravitating towards new political coalitions where presidential victory is likely during the elections. Almost all other political parties have suffered the same fate. Such parties tend to wither away when they do not earn any fortune from the new president after the elections.

A culture of nurturing political parties that truly champion the interests of the people in competitive electoral politics is likely to thrive more in a parliamentary democracy.

Prof Nyong’o is the Governor of Kisumu County