Posted by Tuesday, July 30, 2024 at 06:40 |
Gen Z protesters demonstrate along Saba Saba Road, Mombasa County, Tuesday, July 16, 2024: Photo/Bonface Msangi
Over the weekend, a group of Gen Z bookworms invited me for a literary talk, and the question arose as to whether they were registered to vote. Nearly all of them were registered, but only one in five will vote on August 9, 2022. Yet it is this group that has been angered by bad government in recent weeks.
That means, as a country, we need to go back to the basics and reopen the debate about the idea of taxation and how it relates to representation. This idea was at the heart of the American War of Independence, when Americans argued that it was politically contradictory for Britain to tax its colonies while denying Americans the right to vote. In Kenya’s case, the situation is reversed: many of the young people who, for one reason or another, were unable to vote in 2022 were the most vocal opponents of the 2024 Finance Bill.
According to a former Electoral Commission election official who took part in the weekend debate, if the 8 million Kenyans who couldn’t vote had supported any far-right candidate, that candidate would have beaten his nearest opponent by 700,000 votes. The last time that margin was so large was in 2002, when NARC’s Mwai Kibaki beat Kanu’s Uhuru Kenyatta by 800,000 votes. That was significant, considering Kenya had an electorate of around 10 million at the time.
What does this say about voting patterns and the importance of voting?
First, new voter registration has slowed since 2007. Despite strong registration campaigns and accelerated issuance of ID cards, the number of new voters has historically been far below the number of eligible voters, meaning that millions of people who should have their voices heard through voting are deliberately silencing themselves. Yet with every election cycle since 2007, public anxiety has risen within two years of the election.
Second, the number of people who registered to vote but did not vote has increased since the 2010 referendum, when around 86% of eligible voters cast ballots. This percentage has since decreased, making Nairobi one of the counties with the highest levels of voter apathy.
Nationwide, only 65% of the 22.12 million eligible voters cast ballots in 2022, with average turnout in capital cities below 55%. Nairobi’s case is interesting as it recorded the highest increase among new voters, particularly young people, raising the question of what happened to them between June, when they registered, and August, when the election took place.
Another question has to do with the anger that Gen Z and millennials have shown in recent weeks, making them realise the importance of voting. They say that older people who voted in 2022 are part of Kenya’s historic problem of a lack of leadership, having imposed on the country a current set of political leaders who, in their view, are synonymous with incompetence, corruption and nepotism.
Young people have also suggested, preferably jokingly, that in the next elections, the identity cards of elderly people should be erased the night before the election, “so that they will never make the wrong vote again.” This suggestion, joking or not, is interesting because it strikes at the heart of universal suffrage, an idea that other countries have spent years of blood, sweat and tears to achieve. If taken seriously, it calls into question the very foundations of democracy and forces citizens to think about whether the right to vote should be given to all adults, and if not, what criteria should be used to exclude certain segments of the population.
Ultimately, what these protests should teach Gen Z is, first, that they need to start registering as soon as the electoral commission is reconstituted, and, second, that for their candidate to take power in 2027, they need to outvote everyone else.
—The writer is editor-in-chief of Nairobi Law Monthly and Nairobi Business Monthly.
