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FIRST WORD
On Democratic Math
In August Kenyans trooped to the polling stations to exercise their democratic right to choose their leaders in what was a tense and closely fought contest that had been cleverly cast as a battle of the Hustlers against the Dynasties to appeal to Wanjiku , the voter .
It has become extremely hard to understand what democracy is , especially if we inspect the conduct of the influential and powerful countries that are supposed to be the icons of the election system and who bequeathed us that system .
We know that The United States of America , that beacon of democracy , is a hybrid system where an electoral college supersedes the popular vote . When Americans go to the polls to elect a president they are electing the electors who in turn , will elect the president .
In the United Kingdom we have recently had a curious situation where the country has had four prime ministers without an election . Their parliamentary democratic system allows for intra-party negotiations to form a government without calling a general election .
In China , yes China , the official name of China is The People ’ s Republic of China and they insist that theirs is the true democracy but in their system they do not have elections , they have selections and they claim that their system is superior as it produces statesmen not politicians .
Democracy is derived from the Greek words ‘ demos ’ meaning people and ‘ kratos ’ meaning power , so democracy is the exercise of the power of the people in the governing of a country which depends on the will of the people .
In the examples above we find that the so called will of the people has been circumvented and manipulated by the political class to disenfranchise the common man while convincing them that it is their will that is being exercised .
To paraphrase John Locke , people form a government solely for the preservation of property , which includes life , and as soon as the government ceases to perform that central duty then the people have a right to change the government .
Since there is a natural tendency of those who have acquired power to be unwilling to surrender it , the democratic practice of periodically asking the people to reaffirm their leadership was created hence the election cycles that ensures that people have their say .
But is an election truly an expression of the peoples ’ will ? For the will of the people to be expressed at the ballot then our leaders must be the result of the majority voting for them , that is logical and fair but the reality is far from that .
Kenya has a population of fifty million and those that are deemed by law as able to vote , that is , over the age of eighteen are thirty million . Therefore , thirty million Kenyans should rightly have decided who their leaders were , in the last elections .
Out of that thirty million , only twenty two million managed to register to vote . One may think that the eight million left out are not interested but in most cases it is that they did not have a valid national identity card , a necessary document to register as a voter .