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Monday, December 17, 2007

Political Parties And The 10th Parliament

The political temperatures are very high in Kenya. So high that for sometime I feared to publish the results of a countrywide poll I carried out. Well, I finally published it and got exactly what I had expected. Insults and folks saying that this is an ODM blog.

By publishing the provincial breakdown, I will only attract more insults, so I will not publish any more details about my poll. People will not believe the kind of support the candidate previously known as “the unelectable” enjoys in Simoen Nyachae’s Kisii or in most of Nairobi for that matter. Thank you PKW for reserving your comments for the 28th.

I did not publish the polls to upset anybody, I simply documented what the people on the ground are saying.

With this kind of obsession with the presidential elections, very little attention is being paid to the parliamentary elections. And yet whoever is elected president, their success or failure will hinge very heavily on how much support and goodwill they will enjoy from the 10th parliament.

Going by the mathematical law of probabilities, Kamlesh (or is it Paul?) Pattni’s KENDA party will be an extremely influential political party in the 10th parliament as will ODM-K. But it seems that the most powerful bloc of all will be the collection of numerous little known parties who collectively should end up with the second or third highest number of seats in parliament. This is significant and means that any presidential candidate who hopes to win the forthcoming polls should already be talking to and warming up to these minnows because they will make all the difference in the 10th parliament.

One of the reasons for this fascinating trend will be the fiasco of the party nominations where many popular candidates who had won their party nominations were locked out. They were left with no alternative but to find a way into the ballot paper for the constituency by joining one of the numerous (over 250) political parties. Most of these fringe political parties, Kenyans have never heard of.

Yep. It’s going to be a very fascinating general election.