Sitting presidents won about 88 per cent of the re-elections they sought, according to Nic Cheeseman’s study of multiparty presidential elections in sub-Saharan Africa between 1990 and 2009.
Opposition parties were almost four times more likely to win when the incumbent was not on the ballot. There is something almost poetic about Dr William Ruto’s place in this argument. The man now seeking to defend his incumbency was, in 2002, among those gathered around Daniel arap Moi as it became clear that Mr Uhuru Kenyatta, Kanu’s candidate, was losing. Dr Ruto recalls people at State House asking whether Moi knew what was happening and whether there was a ‘plan B’. Some were apparently waiting for Moi to do something. Dr Ruto later described them as people waiting for a ‘miracle’ from Moi.
That memory is worth holding against the present. Dr Ruto is now the incumbent, seeking another term in 2027. The question his recollection of 2002 raises is not simply whether he can win. It is: What would he do if he lost? An African presidency is rarely just an office occupied for five years. The incumbent controls appointments, patronage, public institutions, security agencies, information and access to state resources. A network of people grows around the presidency whose careers, fortunes and influence depend upon its continued occupation.
Dr Ruto’s case is even more consequential. He had spent the 10 years prior to becoming President inside the executive as Mr Kenyatta’s deputy, building relationships and political networks across the country. By 2022, he had accumulated a decade of experience and political capital within the state.
Cheeseman and Brian Klaas’s How to Rig an Election is more illuminating than conventional literature on electoral fraud. Rigging is not necessarily the stuffing of ballot boxes. More effective forms occur before polling day, including manipulating institutions, controlling information, restricting competition, intimidating opponents and shaping the electoral environment so that the incumbent begins with advantages that are difficult to overcome.
Sometimes those advantages fail. What then? Kenya in 2002 offers a revealing case study. Moi had spent 24 years at the centre of the Kenyan state. In the final days of his presidency, the question was whether a political system organised for years around Moi could absorb defeat.
For decades, political survival had depended upon the presidency’s ability to appoint, reward, punish and intervene. When defeat came into view, some people apparently found it difficult to imagine that the machine could simply switch off. The story of 2002 is usually told as the triumph of Kenyan democracy: Moi lost—Kibaki won, and power changed hands peacefully.
The more interesting story is how difficult it was for those inside the old order to imagine that the era was actually ending. Brigadier Wilson Boinett headed the National Security Intelligence Service at the time. In Fixing Spy Craft to Serve National Interests in Kenya: From the Colonial Special Branch to a Civilian National Intelligence Service, he describes an intelligence service watching the political shift, assessing the likelihood of a Kanu defeat and considering the consequences of an unsettled transfer. His memoir says the service provided intelligence to both Moi and the opposition, including assessments of the threat of unrest, while Mr Boinett advised Moi towards a peaceful handover.
The intelligence services sit at the nexus of political power and state power. If they remain institutionally neutral, they can help an incumbent to understand that the election has been lost and that the state’s obligation is to facilitate the transfer. If they become politically captured, the same machinery can instead become a shield around the incumbent.
Security and intelligence
Going into 2027, it must, therefore, be asked whether the security and intelligence establishment would play the same role under Dr Ruto that Boinett’s service played under Moi. The Constitution is clear that national security organs are subordinate to civilian authority and must not further the interests of a political party or cause. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights has documented enforced disappearances, torture, unlawful use of force and arbitrary arrests linked to security operations, including during the 2024 protests. The point is not to establish that every security agency has become partisan, still less that every officer is politically compromised.
It is to ask whether a security establishment that has become entangled in the defence of an incumbent can be expected to behave as an impartial instrument when that incumbent is threatened with defeat. Mr Boinett’s intelligence service faced an incumbent who was losing and, according to his account, helped him understand the consequences and accept the inevitable. What happens when the security establishment itself has political skin in the game?
Dr Ruto has a particularly unusual vantage point from which to understand this. He has actually sat in the room while an incumbent was losing. He knows what the ‘miracle’ people were waiting for Moi to produce meant. He knows that, in the end, Moi did not conjure it up.
What happens when a man who has spent two decades building political power around the state is told by the electorate that his time is up? The question the President will ultimately have to answer is not whether he promises to accept defeat. It is whether or not the institutions around him will be permitted to remain institutions if defeat becomes real. And this is where the unresolved questions about state capture subsist.
The writer is a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected]
