When candidates and voters focus on exchanging money and not policy ideas, it raises the question about the state of the country’s democracy.
It is agreed that elections provide society with the opportunity to decide how it should be governed. Laws are put in place to guard this process against interference.
It is important to have a picture of the resources available at the electoral level for public service delivery.
This past week I had the opportunity to visit several constituencies and hold discussions with several friends. The consensus is that both the electorate and the politicians focus more on handouts as opposed to engagements on why certain candidates should be elected to office.
What shocked me was the unanimity and callousness with which the dishing of money continues is accepted. The practice is widespread nationwide.
One is left to wonder whether the attempts to make this practice illegal will ever bear any fruit. It is an election offence to either bribe or treat candidates.
The rationale for this is to ensure that the decision to choose leaders is based on free will and not on improper influence. When candidates and voters focus on exchanging money and not policy ideas, it raises the question about the state of the country’s democracy.
It is agreed that elections provide society with the opportunity to decide how it should be governed. Laws are put in place to guard this process against interference.
For long the complaints have been about those seeking political office not identifying and addressing the interests of the populace that they serve.
However, speaking to politicians, they tell a different story. I have heard of cases where one goes to speak to a crowd and they tell him or her expressly that they are more interested in the money he or she will give them as opposed to ideas.
A second individual told me of examples of aspirants going to a community and being told the amounts expected from a certain rank of candidates.
Addressing this problem requires innovation. The use of the Election Offences Act has failed to deter the practice. It is foolhardy to assume having continued faith in its capacity to address the problem will deliver any tangible dividends in 2022. The solution, therefore, lies somewhere else.
A colleague suggested that we should seek to inspire attitudinal change within the larger society. This sounds easy. However, the more complex question is, taking the pervasive behaviour going on within our society, what practical steps can be taken to deal with this issue?
First, it is important to have a picture of the resources available at the electoral level for public service delivery. The government allocates resources to counties, constituencies and in certain cases to wards.
These resources are meant to deliver certain services, be it constituency development fund, bursary fund, ward development fund, and money for counties. With information on the allocations and their functions, citizens should then be able to assess the extent to which these resources are being put to use every year.
The importance of this is to reduce the extent to which these government resources are converted into a weapon for electioneering by those who control them, the elected representatives.
Second, is the need to have a robust citizen group that monitors the monetisation of elections. In this era of technology, it should be easy to have social movements that track the expenditure by candidates focusing on cash handouts with a view not so much on prosecution but for publicisation and using the data to prepare a list of shame.
The list can then act as a basis of naming and shaming. It would be interesting to go beyond the studies that were undertaken in 2017 in terms of how much every elective seat cost candidates to be able to have a list of the top providers of handouts per elective seat across the country.
Third, the list can then form a basis for policy conversation to assess the performance of the individuals who spent the most, their sources of their wealth and prudence in utilising public resources allocated to them.
This way the electorate and the country can assess the link between the resources the leaders spend in handouts and the services they deliver once in charge of public resources.
This will ensure that the conversation about non-monetisation of elections is more informed and focuses on attitudinal change. The time to start this debate is the 2022 elections.
