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C. 1988. Mlolongo system of voting where voters queued behind their preferred candidate_Mwai Kibaki.
n February 1986, a delegates’ conference of Kanu, then the only party whose existence was legally permitted in Kenya, approved a decision that its primaries for the next election, due in 1988, would be conducted through queue voting.
The queue voting came to be known by its Swahili term “mlolongo”. Under mlolongo, pictures of the various candidates seeking to be elected as Members of Parliament would be displayed at the polling station, often an open field, and a voter would queue behind the picture of a preferred candidate.
An audible count of the people in each queue would then follow and the person with the longest queue would be declared the winner.
This process would be held simultaneously in each polling station throughout the constituency and the local District Commissioner, acting as the returning officer, would eventually collate the returns around the constituency in order to derive the winner.
MLOLONGO
Mlolongo had a “70 per cent rule” under which a person who received 70 per cent of the votes during the primaries would be declared elected without having to face the secret ballot election.
While it had many problems, the mlolongo method provided unprecedented transparency, enabling citizens to determine the correct results on their own, without depending on the returning officer.
Around the country, the mlolongo queues were orderly, and provided an early rebuttal of the considerable criticism that this novel method of elections had attracted.
However, the fraud behind this new system soon emerged, when the results started trickling in. In a Parliament of 188 seats, 50 MPs were declared elected under the 70 per cent rule.
NO RECORDS
It soon emerged that the mlolongo method was a ruse to purge Kanu of dissidents, many of whom were very popular, if only because they were dissidents.
The fact that Kanu did not care that citizens knew these results to be fraudulent gave the ruse a shocking level of offence.
Besides the problem of undermining the secrecy of the vote, mlolongo had another problem. It left behind no records. After people went home only to hear the wrong candidates declared winners, there were no paper records with which to challenge the results.
Mlolongo received international condemnation, and the resulting illegitimacy hastened the restoration of multiparty politics, which occurred in November 1991. However, the first multi-party elections, held the following year, were not easy.
ILLEGAL TACTICS
They exposed President Moi to direct political competition, something he had never faced before, and all the signs were that Moi tolerated rather than accepted the competition.
Aided by a plethora of illegal tactics, Moi’s intention was to prevent the opposition from competing with him in the election.
The illegal tactics included violence, zoning off the country into areas where the opposition was not allowed to campaign and bribery that the Goldenberg scandal was created to finance.
Through these tactics, Moi won the 1992 election and also the one that followed in 1997. However, there was no honour in these victories, because of the manner in which they had been achieved.
As a result, the country remained restive throughout the period when Moi was in power after the re-introduction of multi-party politics.