By Brenda Kienga
This is a profound renunciation of the existing delegate electoral voting system that mutilated basic and vital principle of democracy in university politics.
Under the so-called “student friendly” University Act, 2011 already in existence in tertiary institutions across the country, the electoral colleges will be divided through academic departments, schools or faculties.
The issue of universal suffrage is the biggest dearth of mass voting system which ensured one man one vote.
This will risk in dimming vibrancy in students politics and dismember firebrand, revolutionary student leaders with the audacity to represent fellow students in tabling their grievances.
Under each college, a faculty will have to elect three representatives who subsequently elect the students’ governing council that observes a two-third gender rule.
The biggest push for this system is to slay the dragons of hooliganism and ethnicity, but there is no empirical data to back it up.
But what is sure, the system will predisposed student leadership to manipulation by other external forces, and in effect, reduced the student mojo in politics and leadership which is a fatality to the future of this country.
The students in the Universities constitute the largest reservoir of technocrats in Kenya’s development background, providing highly trained manpower in many sectors. More importantly, they should also be the vehicles of ideological dissemination.
However, this system, which was forcefully thrust down to our throats without our inputs or consultations, is ensuring we bring up a generation of technocrats highly skilled in their profession but with little or no leadership and management skills as far as politics or governance is concerned.
It also renders irrelevance to the universities in their role to raise nation’s conscious level and intellectualism in responding to economic, social and political challenges the country struggle through mass action since there is a disconnect between the leader and the masses..
Worst of all, it is programmed to ensure that those chosen serve the universities’ interests as it is prone to manipulation by the invisible hands of the administration and politicians pumping money into campus politics to buy the few delegates votes.
Moreover, it raises critically fundamental questions: If we are living in a robustly democratic nation characterized by a universal suffrage, why can’t voters be allowed to directly elect their leaders?
If the objective is to eradicate chaos, hooliganism and ethnicity depicted in campus politics, especially as we have an history not only in campus but also national politics, then students who are still energetic, brilliant and young enough to begin finding solutions to the country should not be used as lab-rats for a system that has no basis in national politics.
