Details

The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in cooperation with the Centre for Multiparty Democracy (CMD) organized a cross-party town hall debate on meaningful youth involvement in political leadership and decision making. This debate was held on 19th May 2016 at the Museum Hall in Kitale County. A total of 71 members of the audience representing political parties, National Youth Council, youth serving CBOs, students, private sector, civil society, media and professional associations participated in the debate on electoral challenges with a special focus on the issue of voter bribery.

In recent times, a debate has heightened over the political engagement of young people in Kenya. Pundits have expressed concern over the lack of involvement and in some cases total absence of young people from political parties and processes. A baseline study about “Youth in Political Party Participation” commissioned by CMD in 2015 showed that one of the key challenges for youth in Kenya is the lack of knowledge and skills to efficiently participate in the policy development process. The study also established that lack of intraparty democracy is one of the greatest challenges the youth have to contend with and that they are casualties of other undemocratic practices during party nominations such as nepotism, patronage, rigging of primaries and issues of money and electoral process.

To address these challenges, KAS is partnering with CMD to increase the representation and participation of the youth in political leadership and decision making. In execution of this partnership, KAS and CMD has organized debates on electoral challenges to encourage dialogue around issue-based politics between members of political parties, particularly the young elected leaders, aspiring leaders and the public, especially the young voters. The debates aim at capacity building of the youths and thereby empowering them to understand the principles of good governance and hence promote democracy. Participants are encouraged to seek solutions towards tackling the issues around voter bribery, which can have severe consequences: voter bribery is considered to be one of the aspects that prevent young people from meaningful involvement in politics. Moreover it is also linked to other leadership and governance challenges as corruption, poor service delivery and the loss of moral authority by electorates to hold their leaders to account.

Panel forum with young members of political parties and aspirants

The moderated debates involve a panel forum mainly consisting of young members from various political parties in the county. The panellists are carefully selected, actively involved and many times, potentially aspiring political leaders in the next general election in 2017. These panellists are challenged to defend their positions on the issue of voter bribery in front of the audience/participants. In order to emphasize the panelists’ truthfulness and commitment, a rapporteur captured all the contributions made during the debate and re-read them to the panellists. Thereafter the panelists’ would either confirm the rapporteur’s statements as correct to their word or not. During the follow-up, a formal signed declaration by the party representatives involved will be published with regard to their stand towards voter bribery, how it can be tackled and how they plan to escalate the issue to their parties’ levels. All the panellists involved in the debates have signed their declarations committing to personally fight the scourge of voter bribery.

Some of the questions the panellists were required to respond to include:

1. Describe the voter bribery problem and how it affects the electoral process from your perspective.

2. What steps/solutions do you propose need to be taken to address the voter bribery problem?

3. As a member and/or candidate of your political party, explain how you would ensure the voter bribery problem is being addressed by your political party?

Social media mobilization amplified discussion into national debate

With these town hall debates, KAS and CMD provided the participants with a platform to get engaged, speak up and make a meaningful contribution to the discussion concerning the important topic of voter bribery in order to pave way for more ideological politics. But since the country approaches the election year in 2017 which affects every Kenyan, particularly the young, there exists a real need to keep conversations around this issue alive and get as many people involved as possible. The whole event was accompanied by active social media mobilization using the hashtag: #NotWithMyVote and #SayNoToVoterBribery which were highly promoted on Twitter and Facebook. Social media discussions precipitated the message beyond the debating hall and sustained the discussions long after the debates themselves had ended. The participants were highly encouraged to engaged in the discussion through the social media, further amplifying Hence, the debates media into a national debate. This has increased awareness on the issue of voter bribery to a broader audience who continue to make their contribution towards a sustainable change in Kenyan politics.