Saturday, January 05, 2008

Kenyan General Election: ODM's Joseph Nyaga is Spot On


Kenya's Orange Democratic Movement General Secretary Joseph Nyaga made my point about the tribal sectarianism angle being a media construct for me beautifully: "It's colonial anthropology" he told the BBC, going on to explain that people across the whole nation and of all backgrounds who had voted for change were pissed off that they had not got that change.

The incumbent may have achieved 25% of the popular vote in five of the eight districts. A sine qua non of the electoral rubric. And he did win back his own seat, unlike more than half of his ministerial cronies. But in fact he only actually won two of the eight districts outright.

All kinds of strange results are possible on a constituency by constituency basis versus the summary of them, as we know from our own democracy. Even without the sort of serious gerrymander we ourselves had only recently in for example "Slash City" aka Derry*.

But how on earth could he have come out top in the individual vote? The third requirement of the rubric.

* CONUNDRUM: How can a three ward multi seat system with a total of 28 seats deliver a 4-3 council majority from a 3-6 electorate minority?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi CP just added you to my new feed reader. Keep up the good work. W

Chris Paul said...

Cheers Will