How to solve the constituency boundary disputes

 By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

21 November 2010

The dispute over the proposed constituency boundaries was bound to erupt. As I noted during the debate on the new constitution, it was not right to put a limit on the number of constituencies.

Even though the new constitution gives very clear guidelines on how the constituencies should be distributed, it does not explain how the figure of 290 was arrived at. It appears to have been an arbitrary number.

What we need is the maximum population per electoral unit. There is no scientific method of determining this maximum population, but it has now become a common expectation that 100,000 is about right. The United Kingdom, for example, has a population of 61 million and 650 constituencies. This comes to about 94,000 people per constituency.

With 48 million people, South Africa has 650 Members of Parliament. The country however does not have electoral constituencies, but still, this figure comes to about 74,000 people per MP.

The situation in India is somewhat similar to ours. The constitution limits the number to 552. Currently there are 543 constituencies. Now, with a population of 1.14 billion, this works to about 2million people per constituency!

Perhaps the reason behind limiting the number is that the population is too large. If India was to use the 100,000 average, they would end up with over 11,000 MPs!

I still feel that we need to re-think this matter and amend the constitution accordingly. As I had suggested earlier, we can say that no constituency shall have more than 100,000 people at the time of drawing boundaries.

This will give us the number of constituencies required. That would be 388 at the moment. With this figure, we can then put a limit on the maximum size, say double the average. That comes to 3,000 square kilometres.

This plan would work quite well without the kind of arguments that we are having now. In addition, since we do a population census every ten years, we can redraw the boundaries at the same frequency.

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After reading the article about the fate of the Sun, Ken Muturi wondered how its mass was measured: “which scale can measure those many billions of tonnes that you talked about?”

Well, all that is required is knowledge of Newton’s law of universal gravitation. This law gives amount of force between two bodies in terms of their masses and their distance apart.

The distance between the sun and the Earth is known (can be measured with a telescope) and from the speed of revolution of the earth we can find out the amount of force required to keep it in its orbit. The mass of the Earth is also know – I explained how to get it in 2006.

So now we have the mass of the Earth, the distance to the Sun and the force between them. The only thing missing in Newton’s formula is the mass of the Sun…and it comes out quite easily: anyone with form-three mathematics should be able to work it out.