By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
The polling stations close, and with them, something else shuts down; hope, perhaps, or the fragile belief that the act of voting still carries weight beyond ritual. Recent electoral processes have laid bare a disturbing pattern, one that whispers of 2007 in the shadows of ballot boxes and echoes in the silence of citizens who have learned that participation sometimes costs more than abstention. The question is no longer whether the system works, but whether it was ever designed to. In constituencies from the coast to the highlands, from urban centers to rural outposts, the story is remarkably consistent: democracy as performance rather than practice, elections as theater where the outcome is predetermined and the audience merely witnesses a spectacle they can no longer influence. The very infrastructure of choice the polling stations, the ballot papers, the counting processes has become a stage set, elaborate and convincing from a distance, but hollow upon closer inspection. Citizens queue for hours, cast their votes with the solemnity the ritual demands, and then watch as their participation is rendered meaningless through manipulation so brazen it insults the intelligence of those it seeks to deceive.
Across constituencies, reports emerge with troubling consistency: organized groups materializing at polling centers like storm clouds, their presence alone enough to alter the atmosphere from civic to threatening. Voters are turned away through bureaucratic sleight of hand, names mysteriously absent from registers, identification documents suddenly insufficient, polling stations relocated without notice to areas conveniently inaccessible to certain demographics. The sophistication of voter suppression has evolved beyond crude violence to encompass administrative warfare, where the weapon is not the club but the checkbox, not the gun but the gatekeeper’s discretionary power. State machinery, funded by taxpayers ostensibly to safeguard democratic processes, is deployed not to protect but to shape outcomes. Security forces arrive not as neutral arbiters but as actors with assignments, their presence strategic rather than protective. When law enforcement becomes selectively blind to intimidation, when uniformed officers stand aside as chaos unfolds or worse, facilitate it through their inaction, the message transmitted is unambiguous: the state has chosen sides, and it is not with the voter. This represents not merely political bias but a fundamental betrayal of the constitutional order, where those sworn to uphold the law become instruments of its violation.
The result manifests in numbers that tell their own damning story. Turnout plummets not gradually but precipitously, entire communities that once animated streets with campaign fervor now regarding the electoral calendar with the weary resignation of those who have touched fire repeatedly and learned its nature. This apathy is not the laziness that comfortable commentators diagnose from air-conditioned studios, but learned survival, a rational response to a system that punishes engagement as often as it rewards it. When casting a ballot becomes an act requiring physical courage, when the journey to a polling station feels like running a gauntlet through territories controlled by those with vested interests, democracy ceases to be a right and becomes a test of endurance that fewer citizens are willing to take with each cycle. The disengagement is particularly pronounced among young voters, who see their older siblings’ enthusiasm from previous elections curdled into cynicism, who hear the stories of 2007 and 2008 not as history but as prophecy. They calculate the cost-benefit analysis with the cold logic of survival: the hours spent voting versus the hours spent earning a livelihood, the risk of violence versus the probability of meaningful change, the promise of democracy versus the reality of its implementation. Increasingly, the equation does not balance in favor of participation, and one cannot blame them for this arithmetic.
The center, as the poet warned, cannot hold, and we are witnessing in real-time what it looks like when centrifugal forces exceed the binding strength of national cohesion. What was once a fragile consensus that despite our differences in ethnicity, region, religion, and economic status, we would settle our disputes through ballots rather than bullets, has begun to disintegrate not through dramatic rupture but through steady erosion. The social contract, that invisible agreement binding diverse peoples into a single political community, requires all parties to honor its terms even when inconvenient, especially when inconvenient. But when one side consistently rewrites the rules mid-game, when the referees show obvious favoritism, when the playing field is tilted so severely that effort becomes irrelevant, the other side eventually stops playing. We are witnessing not just political dysfunction but the erosion of the basic assumptions that allow disparate groups to coexist within a single national framework. The question that haunts quiet conversations, that lurks unspoken in political analyses, is whether Kenya as currently constituted can survive another electoral crisis. The fractures run deeper now than they did in 2007, the grievances more accumulated, the trust more depleted. The miracle is not that the center might not hold, but that it has held this long given the strains placed upon it.
The electoral commission, inheritor of a trust painstakingly built through reform and sacrifice, through the blood and tears of citizens who demanded better, appears content to spend that inheritance without replenishing the account. The institution bears a name that once signified possibility, a clean break from a discredited past, a commitment to fairness that transcended partisan loyalties. Yet names without substance become hollow totems, symbols that mock rather than inspire. The previous commissioners, whatever their flaws, understood that legitimacy in such an institution is not a permanent state but a continuous achievement, requiring constant effort, transparency that invites scrutiny rather than deflects it, and the courage to make unpopular decisions when integrity demands them. The current stewards seem to have missed this fundamental lesson. Their body language suggests complacency, their communication strategy breeds suspicion, their decisions lack the consultation and transparency that might build confidence. Redemption requires more than technical competence in logistics and ballot management; it demands moral courage, a willingness to stand against pressure from powerful interests, and the understanding that an electoral commission’s true constituency is not the government that appoints it or the politicians who seek to influence it, but the millions of ordinary citizens whose faith in democracy depends on its perceived fairness. The trajectory suggests either a failure to grasp this reality or, more troublingly, a calculated indifference to it, an assumption that legitimacy can be proclaimed rather than earned, that authority flows from titles rather than trustworthiness.
Perhaps most troubling is the elevation of elections to existential battlegrounds where victory justifies any method and defeat implies annihilation, where political contests become proxy wars for deeper conflicts over identity, resources, and historical grievances. This zero-sum mentality transforms civic processes into warfare by other means, where the goal is not consensus but conquest, not governance for all but domination by one group over others. When elections become matters of life and death literally for some who face violence, metaphorically for communities that see their future survival bound up in electoral outcomes, participants inevitably choose survival over principle, security over democracy, the certainty of control over the uncertainty of fair competition. The rhetoric from political elites amplifies this dynamic, speaking in apocalyptic terms about what defeat would mean, painting opponents not as fellow citizens with different visions but as existential threats to the community’s survival. This is not accidental but strategic, a deliberate inflation of stakes that justifies extreme measures and mobilizes supporters through fear rather than hope. The long-term cost of this approach is the complete erosion of any possibility for loyal opposition, for the peaceful transfer of power, for the kind of civic disagreement that strengthens rather than destroys democratic systems. We are creating a political culture where compromise is betrayal, where moderation is weakness, where the only recognized currencies are power and its absence.
The sovereignty of the people remains our most potent doctrine and our most convenient fiction, invoked by all sides whenever it serves their interests and ignored when it does not. Citizens possess the power to choose their leaders, yes, but that power operates within constraints of information asymmetry, systematic manipulation, media capture, and manufactured consent that make genuine choice more theoretical than real. If voters select incompetence or corruption, perhaps it reflects not their failure of judgment but the success of systems designed to limit meaningful choice, to ensure that regardless of which option prevails, certain interests remain protected and certain structures remain intact. Democracy contains no guarantee of wisdom, only of reflection the leaders we get often mirror not our highest aspirations but our collective consciousness, with all its contradictions, prejudices, and compromises. The electorate votes based on the information available to them, information filtered through media outlets with their own agendas, through social networks awash in disinformation, through tribal and ethnic lenses that distort as much as they reveal. To blame the masses for poor leadership while ignoring the systematic ways choice is constrained and information is manipulated is to miss the forest for the trees. It is to hold ordinary citizens responsible for outcomes engineered by elites who have mastered the art of democratic aesthetics while gutting democratic substance. The reflection in the mirror may be unflattering, but we must ask who controls the angle of the mirror and the lighting in the room.
Yet this is no moment for fatalism, for resignation to what feels like inevitable decline, for the luxury of despair that allows us to feel sophisticated in our cynicism while abdicating responsibility for change. The danger is real and immediate, not some distant theoretical possibility but a present threat whose contours become clearer with each electoral cycle. The patterns we observe today, the voter suppression, the state violence, the institutional decay, were dismissed as alarmist warnings in the past, until streets ran with blood and the nation teetered on the brink of complete fracture, until neighbors who had lived peacefully for generations suddenly became enemies, until the international community had to intervene to pull the country back from the abyss. Those who forget history are not condemned to repeat it; they are already repeating it, often deliberately, sometimes through calculated choices by those who benefit from chaos, sometimes through the passive acceptance of citizens who cannot imagine that the worst could happen again. The machinery of division is well-oiled and operational, maintained by political entrepreneurs who understand that fear and tribal solidarity are more reliable mobilizers than hope and national unity. It waits only for the right provocation or convenient crisis to activate fully, to transform electoral competition into communal conflict, to turn political differences into existential warfare. The question is not whether we are headed toward darkness but how close we are willing to get before we turn back, how many warning signs we need before we acknowledge the trajectory we are on.
The path forward requires clear sight, unsentimental honesty about where we are and how we arrived here, and courage to undertake difficult reforms that will face resistance from entrenched interests. First, institutions must be rebuilt from the ground up, not with cosmetic changes and new acronyms but with genuine independence enforced through structural checks that make capture difficult and accountability automatic. This means financial autonomy that prevents budget manipulation as a tool of control, appointment processes that involve genuine public participation rather than backroom deals, and consequences for commissioners who violate public trust that go beyond polite resignation to include real penalties. The electoral commission in particular needs not just new leadership but a new framework that makes it answerable to citizens rather than to the political class, that gives it the power and resources to resist pressure that builds in redundancies so that manipulation of one node in the system cannot corrupt the entire process.
Second, the normalization of electoral violence must be confronted with consistent consequences; not after the fact, when the damage is done and prosecution becomes selective political theatre, but through preventive frameworks that make intimidation costly before it begins. This requires transforming how security forces are deployed during elections, with clear protocols that remove discretion from local commanders who may have partisan sympathies, with international observers embedded not just in polling stations but in security coordination centers, with real-time monitoring systems that create immediate accountability for violence. It means prosecuting electoral offenses regardless of the political affiliation of perpetrators, building a jurisprudence that establishes violence against voters as an attack on the constitutional order itself. The culture of impunity that currently prevails where goons are hired to disrupt elections with the confidence that no consequences will follow must be broken decisively, with high-profile prosecutions that send unmistakable signals that democratic sabotage carries serious costs.
Third, civic education must shift from the mechanics of voting to the philosophy of democracy, from teaching citizens how to mark ballots to cultivating deep understanding of why democracy matters and what it requires from participants beyond election day. This means education that begins in schools and continues through public campaigns, that reaches beyond urban educated populations to rural communities, that uses every available medium from radio to social media to build a culture of democratic citizenship. Citizens must understand that their power lies not just in choosing leaders but in holding them perpetually accountable between elections, in organizing, in demanding transparency, in using constitutional mechanisms to check abuse of power. They must develop critical thinking skills that allow them to evaluate political claims, to resist manipulation, to see through appeals to ethnic solidarity when those appeals serve elite rather than community interests. And finally, we must recover the art of disagreement without demonization, the capacity to contest ideas vigorously while acknowledging shared humanity and shared fate. This requires leadership willing to lower the temperature, to speak to national rather than tribal constituencies, to model the kind of respectful competition that builds rather than destroys social cohesion. It requires media willing to resist the financial temptations of sensationalism, to provide platforms for dialogue rather than just megaphones for monologue. And it requires citizens willing to extend the grace they hope to receive, to recognize that those who vote differently are not enemies but neighbors with whom we must continue living regardless of who wins.
The choice, if we still have one, is to either continue sleepwalking toward a precipice whose edge we have already seen or to undertake the harder work of repair before the fractures become irreparable. Democracy is not a birthright that maintains itself but a garden that dies without constant tending, that requires weeding and watering and the hard work of cultivation from every generation. Kenya stands at a crossroads that is really no crossroads at all, since one path leads clearly forward toward a more perfect union and the other clearly back to places we swore never to revisit, to the violence of 2007-2008, to the breakdown of order, to the betrayal of the independence generation’s hopes. The electorate deserves better than a choice between bad and worse, between corrupt incompetence and competent corruption. The nation deserves a politics that does not require courage simply to participate, where voting is an act of hope rather than an act of bravery. And the dead of past conflicts deserve the assurance that their sacrifice purchased permanent change, not just temporary peace, that the blood spilled in 2008 was not in vain but bought lessons we would never forget and reforms we would never reverse. Whether we honor these obligations or betray them will determine not just the next election but whether elections still matter at all, whether Kenya will continue as a democratic experiment or will join the long list of nations where the promise of self-governance gave way to strongman rule, ethnic balkanization, or perpetual instability. The hour is late, but it is not yet too late. That is both our hope and our burden.
The writer is a legal scrivener
