By Abdullahi Abdi

There is a Somali proverb whose wisdom should trouble anyone concerned about the direction of electoral politics in Garissa: Hal xaaraan ahi nirig xalaal ah ma dhasho. Loosely rendered, this means that an unlawfully acquired she-camel cannot give birth to a lawful calf. Its political meaning is compelling. A fundamentally defective process cannot be sanitised merely by producing a desirable outcome. If the procedure by which political authority is allocated is opaque, exclusionary, and unaccountable, the legitimacy of what emerges from it will always remain open to question.

That is precisely the difficulty confronting the increasingly institutionalised practice of elder-mediated political selection in Garissa, and more broadly, in parts of northern Kenya.

The problem is not the existence of elders. Somali society has for centuries relied on them for mediation, reconciliation, communal deliberation, and the settlement of disputes. Nor is there anything objectionable about elders expressing political preferences; they are citizens, and they possess the same constitutional rights to political expression and association as everyone else. The problem arises when moral authority quietly becomes political jurisdiction, when consultation becomes selection, and when endorsement hardens into an informal veto over another citizen’s constitutional right to seek elective office.

In Garissa, this problem takes on an especially sensitive dimension through the invocation of al-Fātiḥa, the opening surah of the Qur’an, during political settlements.

The Fātiḥa occupies a sacred place in Islam, and its religious significance is not in question here. What deserves examination is its deployment within an inherently political process, in which candidates may be asked to defer their ambitions, accept an elders’ settlement, give their blessing to another candidate, and allow him to proceed carrying what is presented as the collective blessing of the clan. Many candidates comply, not necessarily because an electoral contest has demonstrated that another candidate commands greater popular support, nor because delegates have rejected them in a transparent nomination, but because refusing an arrangement sanctified by elders and sealed with the solemn invocation of the Fātiḥa can carry enormous moral and communal weight.

The candidate, in other words, is confronted with something far more formidable than an ordinary political negotiation. He is not merely being asked whether he will withdraw. Implicitly, he may also be facing a much harder question: will he defy the elders, disturb clan unity, and appear to walk away from an understanding solemnised through a religious invocation? That distinction matters enormously.

The Fātiḥa must not become an electoral instrument

This argument has to be stated with care. The objection is neither to the Qur’an nor to the recitation of the Fātiḥa; it is to the conversion of religious reverence into political leverage. Sacred practice should not become a substitute for democratic procedure. Where candidates voluntarily pray together after reaching a genuinely consensual political agreement, that is entirely their right. But where religious solemnity becomes intertwined with an opaque selection mechanism, in a manner that makes dissent morally or socially prohibitive, an important boundary has been crossed. A political decision has, in effect, acquired a religious aura.

The danger here is not subtle. A candidate who challenges an ordinary political decision can simply say the procedure was unfair. A candidate confronting a decision clothed in clan authority and solemnised through the Fātiḥa occupies a far more difficult position, because political disagreement can then be read socially as disrespect for elders, repudiation of communal consensus, or even irreverence toward a solemn undertaking. Yet disagreeing with elders about who should contest an election is not disagreement with Islam. Refusing to abandon one’s candidacy is not sacrilege. And the Fātiḥa, sacred to Muslims regardless of clan, political party, or candidate, should never be allowed to function as the seal of an unofficial electoral tribunal.

Who gave the elders jurisdiction?

The constitutional question is, in the end, remarkably straightforward. Article 1 of the Constitution of Kenya vests all sovereign power in the people of Kenya, exercised directly or through democratically elected representatives, and Article 38 guarantees every citizen’s right to make political choices and, subject to constitutional requirements, to be a candidate for public office. Parliament has enacted laws regulating political parties and nominations, and parties themselves operate under constitutions, nomination rules, and statutory obligations. Where, then, does an informal council of elders derive the authority to decide that one qualified citizen should proceed while another withdraws?

There is no constitutional electoral college of clan elders, no statutory “Garissa Council of Candidate Selection,” no independent returning officer, ordinarily no register establishing who constitutes the electorate in these processes, no predetermined rules on evidence, quorum, or appeal, and often no clear answer to the most elementary democratic question of all: who selected the selectors? Age deserves respect. Experience deserves consideration. Neither, by itself, constitutes an electoral mandate.

Contrast this with institutionalized nomination processes

Consider, by comparison, the presidential nomination processes of the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, invoked here not as a democratic ideal but as an example of procedural institutionalisation. Those systems are far from perfect; they have been criticised for the influence of money, party establishments, and complicated delegate rules. But the crucial distinction is institutional visibility: candidates know the rules, voters participate in primaries and caucuses, delegates are allocated according to published procedures, and results are announced and open to scrutiny by journalists and rival campaigns alike.

Disputes can be contested under established party rules and applicable law. Most importantly, the identity of those empowered to participate, and the mechanism through which their votes acquire significance, is ascertainable before the contest even begins. One need not regard the American primary system as a model to recognise the elementary principle involved: a nomination process worthy of democratic legitimacy must have knowable rules and identifiable decision-makers.

The Garissa elders’ model frequently offers the inverse. Who participates, how those participants were selected, what criteria they apply, and whether their deliberations involve voting, consensus, or predetermined clan arithmetic may all be unclear, and whether particular elders hold undisclosed relationships with candidates may be impossible for the public to establish at all. When the decision finally emerges, the electorate is presented with something approaching a fait accompli: the elders have spoken, the Fātiḥa has been recited, and the clan has supposedly decided. That is not an electoral college, a primary election, or a party nomination convention. It is political gatekeeping operating largely outside the institutional safeguards normally associated with democratic choice.

The difference between advice and veto

This distinction must be preserved. An elder possesses every right to say, “After considering the candidates, I believe Candidate A is best suited to represent our community.” Ten elders may say the same thing; a hundred may do so; that is political participation, plain and simple. But saying, “We have selected Candidate A; Candidate B must therefore withdraw, and the clan must now rally behind our decision,” is a qualitatively different proposition.

The first seeks to persuade the electorate. The second seeks, in effect, to narrow the electorate’s choices before the electorate has spoken. The first is an exercise of political speech; the second approximates an assertion of political jurisdiction. The Constitution protects the former. It provides no obvious foundation for the latter.

The fiction of voluntary withdrawal

Defenders of negotiated democracy may respond that nobody physically prevents the unsuccessful aspirant from contesting, and that candidates who defer do so voluntarily. That argument rests on an excessively narrow conception of coercion. Somali social organisation attaches considerable importance to kinship solidarity, elder authority, reputation, and communal obligation, and a candidate who proceeds against an elders’ decision may find himself accused of dividing the clan or facilitating a rival community’s victory; add the solemn invocation of the Fātiḥa, and the moral pressure becomes still more powerful.

The law should therefore distinguish between formal freedom and substantive freedom: a candidate may technically remain free to contest while facing social sanctions so formidable that exercising that freedom becomes extraordinarily costly, and a resignation signed under such pressure remains, on paper, a resignation, without settling the harder question of how freely the underlying choice was actually made.

From popular sovereignty to gatekeeper sovereignty

There is an even more dangerous consequence to all this. When aspiring politicians learn that political survival depends principally on satisfying a handful of gatekeepers rather than persuading thousands of ordinary citizens, accountability begins flowing in the wrong direction: instead of asking what the people of Garissa want, the rational politician asks what the elders who control the endorsement want, and that small shift transforms incentives across the board.

Manifestos become secondary to negotiations; public debate gives way to private bargaining; and women and young people, who make up enormous portions of the electorate, find themselves particularly marginal to a process dominated by elderly men. The voter retains the ballot but loses influence over the menu from which the ballot chooses. That is disenfranchisement by filtration rather than prohibition, and it is no less real for being harder to name.

Secrecy creates its own legitimacy crisis

Any institution exercising consequential political power should be capable of answering elementary questions about itself: how were the elders appointed, how many participated, and were women and young people represented? What criteria determined the preferred candidate, and were all candidates measured against the same ones? What mechanisms exist for the disclosure of financial interests, political commitments, promised appointments, or other conflicts capable of influencing the decision? Was there a vote, and if so, was the decision unanimous, and if not, where is the dissent recorded? What mechanism exists for appeal?

These questions should not be regarded as disrespectful to elders. They are the minimum questions democracy asks of anyone who claims the authority to make consequential decisions on behalf of others. Accountability is not an insult. Transparency is not rebellion. And asking an elder to explain the basis on which he purports to determine the political future of thousands of citizens is not an abandonment of Somali culture; it is citizenship.

“Hal xaaraan ahi nirig xalaal ah ma dhasho”

Here the Somali proverb returns with particular force. Hal xaaraan ahi nirig xalaal ah ma dhasho: an illegitimate beginning cannot easily produce a legitimate end.

The wisdom is profoundly compatible with the constitutional doctrine of procedural fairness: modern public law recognises something Somali customary wisdom understood in its own idiom long ago, that the legitimacy of an outcome cannot be fully detached from the legitimacy of the process that produced it. A fair candidate emerging from an unfair procedure does not retrospectively make the procedure fair.

A competent governor selected through an opaque arrangement does not validate opacity. A peaceful outcome does not necessarily establish democratic legitimacy. And the invocation of a sacred text cannot cure procedural defects in what remains, at bottom, an essentially political process. The Fātiḥa may bless people. It cannot confer electoral jurisdiction where the Constitution has conferred none.

Democracy includes the right to lose

Competitive elections are frequently criticised for dividing Somali communities, and they certainly can. But democracy was never designed to eliminate disagreement; it provides a peaceful mechanism through which disagreement can be expressed and resolved. A citizen possesses no constitutional right to win an election, but a qualified citizen holds political rights that cannot simply be displaced because an informal gathering believes another person should proceed unopposed.

There is dignity even in electoral defeat: a candidate who receives twenty per cent of the vote has learned something real about his support, just as a candidate receiving seventy per cent has acquired demonstrable political legitimacy. The electorate, in either case, has spoken. By contrast, when five, fifteen, or fifty individuals negotiate a candidacy behind closed doors and subsequently announce that “the community has decided,” an obvious question arises: when, exactly, did the community vote?

Reform the institution rather than destroy it

Garissa need not choose between Somali tradition and constitutional democracy; that is a false dichotomy. Put simply: Somali consensus is not incompatible with democracy; unaccountable gatekeeping is. Elders remain indispensable repositories of social memory, mediation experience, and communal legitimacy, and their contribution to reconciliation and political dialogue should continue. But their role should be consultative rather than dispositive.

If negotiated nominations are genuinely preferred, then democratise them. Create a transparent delegate system; publish the eligibility rules; establish an identifiable electoral college representing settlements and communities, with women, youth, professionals, persons with disabilities, religious scholars, and businesspeople among them. Set nomination criteria before candidates present themselves. Require disclosure of conflicts of interest. Use secret ballots where appropriate, publish results, and establish a mechanism for complaints and appeals. Then let candidates decide, freely, whether to participate. Such a system would not destroy Somali consensus politics; it would rescue it from the accusation of being a mechanism through which a few people appropriate the political agency of the many. And crucially, religious observance should remain exactly what it is: sacred. The Fātiḥa should unite believers before God, not become an instrument through which one candidacy acquires a moral sanctity denied to another.

Garissa must decide who has the right to decide

Ultimately, this controversy is not about elders, nor about one clan, one candidate, or one election. It concerns the location of political sovereignty. If sovereignty belongs to the people, then political processes must begin from that proposition rather than merely acknowledge it on election day. Elders can advise, mediate, and persuade. They can endorse, reconcile candidates after bitter contests, and bring to bear the wisdom accumulated through generations of Somali political experience. But they should not constitute an unelected electoral college whose decisions acquire binding political force through secrecy, social pressure, and religious solemnisation.

The ballot belongs to the citizen. The Fātiḥa belongs to the sacred realm of faith. Neither should be appropriated to legitimise an opaque political bargain. Garissa cannot credibly demand transparency from governors, parliamentarians, and county officials while exempting from scrutiny the very process through which those leaders are first elevated; we cannot condemn unaccountable power after an election while tolerating unaccountable power before it.

The Constitution’s answer is unambiguous: sovereign power belongs to the people. Somali wisdom supplies an equally powerful warning: Hal xaaraan ahi nirig xalaal ah ma dhasho. If we want legitimate leaders, we must begin with legitimate processes.

Abdullahi Abdi
Email: abdulomar55@gmail.com
——–
Abdullahi writes on Somali governance, political economy, and democratic institutions.