NZAU MUSAU
Africa-Press – Kenya. On Thursday last week, a total of 8,506 advocates turned out to vote for their new Law Society of Kenya president and council members.
Quite apart from the appalling apathy – 46.55 per cent of the 18,357 eligible voters turned up to vote for the President – there was more contrast than drama on the voting day itself.
Milimani Commercial Courts and its eight polling stations were the hotbed of the young bar vote. The majority trooped there in their usual style, ‘route 11’, hastily cutting through Uhuru Park, arriving sweaty to cast their vote.
In contrast, the Supreme Court, with 11 polling stations, was the stronghold of senior and mid-bar. They pulled over in unmistakable class, complete with personal aides carrying their Identification Cards (ID) and cameras.
Speaker of the National Assembly Moses Wetang’ula, Senior Counsel, was quite the spectacle. He strode in with an ID number stored in his memory, was asked to physically present the actual document, before he was eventually turned away.
According to Dr Owiso Owiso, the secretary of the Elections Board, Wetang’ula was not eligible to participate in the election. Only state officers who have taken out practising certificates were eligible to participate.
The list of eligible voters had been out for inspection more than a month. There had also been a sensitisation exercise on the vote a few days to the poll. Obviously, many members did not participate in these two important exercises.
Besides Milimani and Supreme Court, advocates across 35 other polling stations spread across the country turned up to vote. When the final tally was declared, the myth of young bar being the swing vote was crushed.
Charles Kanjama, a favourite of the senior and mid-bar, scored 3,744 against Peter Wanyama’s 2,649 and Mwaura Kabata’s 2,113. Over the campaigns, the latter pair attracted considerable support from the young bar and corresponding disapproval of the seniors.
At the Supreme Court, the seniors blessed Kanjama with a 1,000-vote lead, casting a total of 1,666 votes for him against Wanyama’s 694 and Kabata’s 743. It would require a miracle to close this gap.
In Milimani, 1,003 young lawyers polled for Kanjama, 938 for Wanyama and 758 for Kabata. Here, you could say the young bar distributed the votes almost evenly between the three candidates.
Still, Kanjama narrowly whipped the supposedly young bar favourites, burying them in a single grave. Together, Milimani and the Supreme Court gave Kanjama 2,669 votes, enough to beat both gentlemen. He did not have to move outside Nairobi to bury them.
Given these results, and the dynamics that informed them, the Society may want to revisit the utility of distinctly classifying qualified advocates into these classes and separating their voting stations.
There were a few other notables. You could glean tribal and regional considerations in the vote. Some candidates scooped the entire vote in their home stations.
Then there was the little matter of 40 votes spoiled in the presidential race, 79 in the VP race, and a whopping 112 votes in the Nairobi Representative race. The question then becomes, if an advocate can waste so many votes in making a simple choice, what about an ordinary, uneducated voter in the coming general election?
Charles Kanjama ran a simple, elegant and clean campaign. It boiled down to four relatable concepts that appealed to a voter worried for his country and his profession: rule of law, integrity, practice and welfare, and engagement.
Kanjama’s victory is significant in special ways. One, it demonstrates that voters are smart enough to see beyond the smokescreens of charged campaigns. During the campaigns, he was roundly dismissed as the “monk who hides in the monastery”.
Two, I was initially hesitant to have a religious extremist preside over affairs of the Society. I thought I was in good company until I was convinced against the folly of advocates punishing one of their own over his convictions or opinions.
Third and finally, the election of Kanjama was a thumbs-up for integrity. In a way, it was also a protest vote in disapproval of conduct observed over the campaign period, which bordered on improper influence of voters.
Musau, an Advocate of the High Court, is a Senior Project Manager with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The views expressed here are his own.
Source: The Star
