Home » Media Centre » Blogs » Now that the 10th Parliament failed to Pass the Campaign Finance Bill
Now that the political party primaries are over we can expect that campaigns for the general election on March 4th to begin in earnest. However the campaigns will remain largely unregulated at least as far as campaign financing is concerned. Why? Because the MPs of the 10th Parliament left the House, or rather their term expired on 14th January, without them passing the Campaign Finance Bill, 2012.
The Campaign Finance Bill sought to regulate campaign financing in way that has never happened in previous electoral campaigns. The Bill would have regulated amounts and kind of donations that political parties and aspirants can receive, it would have placed a ban on anonymous contributions, would have obligated parties and aspirants to make full disclosure and documentation of sources of funds.
Basically, the bill would have created some sort of transparency with regards campaign financing and expenditure by political parties and aspirants; and let’s face the bill would timely since we as the citizenry know very little about how parties and aspirants finance their campaigns. What we do know is that both political parties and aspirants for various elected positions spend millions and maybe even billions on campaign finance and this year will be no different.
As early as February 2012 papers were already making predictions that the coming election would most likely be our most expensive elections yet: not just in terms of the cost of running elections, but also in terms of how much political parties and aspirants will spend on financing campaigns. The East African put the price tag at upwards of 130 million shillings per candidate while a report in the Nation put the estimates to be spent by Presidential aspirants alone somewhere in the billions.
This is a problem for several reasons financing and the secrecy that surrounds it distorts the democratic process.
Unregulated campaign financing creates an uneven playing field - not every aspirant/political party can raise billions or even hundreds of millions or are independently wealthy to finance their campaigns the tune of billions or hundreds of millions. The parties and aspirants with the most money to spend obviously get more airtime (and airtime whether TV, radio, billboards, t-shirts does not come cheap. More airtime means greater exposure, greater exposure means that more people, voters know you regardless of whether or not you are the better candidate, and people vote for people they feel they know. With unregulated campaign finance the parties with less money are woefully disadvantaged in terms of national exposure.
Unregulated campaign financing also distorts voters’ choices, particularly where a majority of the voters are poor or youth with no jobs, the amount of money parties/aspirants can spend means that choice is no longer based on rational, fair and equal examination of competing ideas but rather which aspirant/party that can give the biggest handouts. Also money raised from the private, anonymous sources is unlikely to come without strings attached. In short the secrecy that surrounds campaign finance allows electoral corruption to flourish.
Given the many pitfalls of unregulated campaign financing the obvious question is, given that the 10th Parliament passed a record 30 bills in its last few days (20 of the bills dated 2012 and the rest dated 2013) why wasn’t the Campaign Finance Bill among those past?
Categories: No tags
You must login to comment
There are no comments.