Now is the time to change Kenya

Registration is at the constituency headquarters, which requires prospective voters to travel long distances. Registration at every chief’s office or a mobile system of some sort would have netted numbers close to the 6.3 million new voters IEBC claims to be targeting, 70 per cent of them being the young, 18-30 demographic.

A low turn-out of mainly older voters, favours incumbency; it might change the faces, but only the votes of the youth can change the system.

As far as one can tell, registration is proceeding at a glacial pace. The last update by IEBC was on October 10 last year and at the time 20,754 new voters had been registered. If the youth apathy continues, it means that the aspirations of the single largest demographic block – Gen Zs and Millennials – the ones with the biggest stake in the country and its future, will not be reflected in the electoral choices of 2027.

I know Kenyan politicians are a rough bunch, they are not bothered by the niceties of legitimacy or questions of political morality, they are singularly focused on winning and not on the how of it. Which will be a terrible shame because Kenya will never rise to its full potential without a software upgrade to rid it of the desperate corruption of the political class and establish a new ethos of diligence, competence and integrity.

This non-participation, being locked out, the business-as-usual of dishing jobs out corruptly, social media videos of illiterate fat cats swimming in such huge sums of money that it can’t be counted, it can only be weighed by the kilo, will breed resentment, a sense of being unfairly left out and disillusionment. This will in turn result in a culture of angry protests and violence.

But the intent of democracy is not to pander to sloth and a general lack of seriousness among the citizenry. In my opinion, citizens have no right to change government from the street if they were offered an opportunity to do so at the ballot and didn’t take it.

Looking with a cold eye at the political reality today, UDA is consolidating power and expanding with ruthless and single-minded focus.

I’d say that it has expanded its appeal from around 16 per cent to the low 20s. These are the political doldrums but the trajectory is positive. ODM, Raila’s party is like Jonah; it is going through the painful pangs of being swallowed by the whale, its head and abdomen are halfway down the gullet of the beast, only its legs – made up of Edwin Sifuna and a few like-minded people – are still out, flailing and fighting.

It looks like the whale has made its calculations and decided to cut its losses, bite off the legs and discard them rather than fight to force them down.

From polling data, which must always be taken with caution (because polling firms are not all immune to intimidation by the State or sweeteners and) based on my strong suspicion that positive ratings are driven quite a bit by visibility, I’d guess that President Ruto is still the man to beat but with very low approval ratings, certainly below 30 per cent.

I’d hazard a guess that Dr Fred Matiang’i, is in a strong second position, appealing to those attracted to administrative competence and orderly government, with Kalonzo Musyoka not too far back, buoyed by experience and an equanimity of manner.

I would expect the stock of undecided voters to hover around 30 per cent, give or take five per cent, most probably scoring roughly at the same level as the most popular candidate. These would be voters who have written off, or are close to writing off, Mr Ruto but have not had sufficient experience of the other candidates to form a preference. The race is still as wide open as a church door.

For those who want to make a difference, the first thing to do is to ensure that you are registered. IEBC needs pressure to keep it honest and to force it to register Kenyans, especially the youth. The other thing is to campaign strongly against and document unequal issuance of IDs. And civic groups need to run campaigns to drive citizens to the registration centres.

Finally, some of the politicians will be like those companies which spend billions making products no one has use for, messianically hacking away at issues that voters don’t give a hoot about. This will be the welfare election – heavy taxation, collapsing prosperity in the face of a patchwork of opulence, unemployment, economic favouritism and discrimination, corruption and the economic betrayal of the “hustler’. Of course there will be tribalism, party affiliation and all the usual favourites.

But this will be the first stomach election in 20 years.

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