Election: Stop dancing in the streets

In our system, the final decision is never truly left to the voter. The voter is given the illusion of choice, but the range of acceptable outcomes has already been narrowed long before election day. What appears to be spontaneous democratic energy is often carefully modulated, spoon fed emotion.

I am a great fan of war stories, lately on YouTube. The Americans have popularised a phrase, “shaping operations”, which my dictionary defines as preparatory actions conducted to influence the operational environment, weaken an opponent's options and create favourable conditions for decisive action. It is a useful phrase because it captures exactly what often happens in our politics.

There appears to be a great deal of shaping going on now, especially around Mt Kenya and Western Kenya. We are being treated to waves of entertaining drama, public quarrels, sudden reconciliations, strategic insults, choreographed indignation and hints of firings and hirings, seeded by bloggers. Much of it looks organic. Very little of it probably is. The function of such theatre is to redraw the political map in a predetermined manner while persuading us that the events are unfolding naturally.

President Moi's 1992 election victory was a class act, perhaps the biggest triumph of this machinery. There was no more unpopular politician in Kenya that year than Moi. In a straight contest, the opposition, much of it fresh from jail, morally energised by public sympathy and intoxicated by the scent of victory, should have whitewashed him. Instead, the masters of divide-and-rule created a paper tiger, splintered the opposition and delivered Moi one of the most unlikely victories in Kenyan electoral history.

That script should not be remembered as something that belongs to the museum, its disciples are still at work. It should be studied as a manual. Its methods were effective because they worked on durable weaknesses in our politics: ethnic suspicion, elite greed, institutional cowardice and a citizenry too easily recruited into emotional warfare.

The first instrument was violence, especially when ethnicised and localised. The clashes of the early 1990s were presented as ancient tribal hatreds erupting spontaneously, yet they served a precise political purpose. Communities likely to vote against the regime were terrorised, displaced and atomised. Fear fractured social trust. The vote-rich Rift Valley became not simply a battleground of ideas, but a theatre of intimidation. Once politics enters the home through fire and machete, ideals, clever choice and all that stuff leaves through the window.

The second instrument was patronage. The Moi state understood that power in Kenya is rarely sustained by argument alone. It is lubricated by access. Cash handouts, harambees, relief food, jobs, contracts and selective development became tools of political management. Entire communities were taught to read politics not as a contest of ideas, but as a soko in which loyalty sells like a hot cake and dissent is hunger. Citizenship was reduced to bargaining for crumbs from a table built with our taxes.

The third instrument was fear as a philosophy of government. Detentions, torture, surveillance, disappearances and the occasional spectacular assassination did more than eliminate critics. They trained the public: they told ordinary folk, civil servants and even ambitious politicians that there was a price for stepping out of line. Such systems do not need to punish everyone.

They only need to punish enough people, visibly enough, for the lesson to sink into the national bloodstream.

The fourth element was keeping the elite in a permanent state of uncertainly. Reshuffles, demotions, promotions, expulsions and selective rehabilitation kept the blood pressure of the political class permanently up. In such a climate, principle becomes expensive and loyalty becomes survival. A frightened elite cannot organise an alternative centre of power. It spends its time fearfully reading signals, not building institutions.

And beneath all this ran the economics of plunder. Authoritarian politics is expensive. It requires money to buy silence, manufacture consent and reward enforcers. So looting is not an accidental side effect of bad government; it is often central to the system. Public assets are stripped, procurement becomes a feeding trough and entire sectors are organised around political extraction. The citizen pays twice - first through theft, and then through the collapse of services. This is why the current political moment should be approached with caution and reason, not emotion. Whenever national politics becomes too theatrical, whenever regional emotions are being massaged too expertly, whenever outrage seems to arrive on schedule, it is wise to ask what knife is being sharpened for you under the table.

The duty of the voter is not just to choose, it is also to resist being programmed.

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Mr Mathiu is a communications consultant and farmer. [email protected].