President William Ruto and Deputy President Kithure Kindiki during a consultative forum to review Kenya's foreign policy at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, Nairobi.
Journalist Aoko Otieno, who blogs as “Maverick” on X, and whose raw brutality of style must make many a print editor cringe in their starched collars and pause in their noble task of massaging the corpses of our glorious past, recently posed what I am given to thinking as Aoko’s Maxim: If, oh dear Lord, the faecal encrusted ablution bucket at Kamukunji Police Station were to run against President William Ruto in 2027, the bucket would win by 6am.
Aoko is more courageous and has better political sources than most political journalists. However, there are problems with that conclusion.
This is nitpicking but polls open at 6am, the bucket would still have to wait until the votes are cast. The bucket has five problems.
First, Aoko’s conclusion is a bit utopian. It assumes that Kenya is a democracy and the people vote for their interests. History tells us that Kenya is not a democracy and the people do not rationally vote for their interests. Also, presidents are not elected on the basis of performance or popularity. Majority of Kenyans put their votes in the box dictated by tribal waves, those who have bribed them or various other irrational and emotional reasons, such as loyalty, pity or foolish admiration.
In 1992, my constituency at the time, Imenti Central, voted for former President Daniel Moi, in power for 24 years, friend of Ceausescu who had dissidents’ nails pulled out. The same constituency elected a rapist to represent it in the National Assembly.
Desire to tame Central Kenya
Yes, we have institutions of State and troop to the polls every five years, but we are a “goatocracy”. We are not exactly like sheep —dim, docile, benign, blindly following our tribal shepherd. We are like goats — we follow the shepherd but we are driven by a destructive hunger. In our eating, we don’t care about tomorrow; we eat everything, and not just the leaves, we dig out the roots and eat them too, guaranteeing famine even after the next rain.
Secondly, are complications arising from the unspoken attempted coup of June 24. The Gen Z protests were like a hotdog. On the outside were genuine protests by our lovely children, outraged by what they saw as fake promises of an incompetent and tone deaf government. Basically, they were saying, shape up or we’ll do a Bangladesh on you.
But within it was an opportunistic mobilisation of basically thugs, according to some of my sources, with the intention of taking power. I have grown fat on my pension so I don’t think I would fit in the boot of a Subaru. I will only say that in power elite circles, the conclusion was that elements in a certain region wanted to take power by the backdoor. However, various institutions whose job is to look through key holes and keep governments in power were generally awake and one thing led to another.
I am told that among the political elite, the desire to “tame” Central Kenya, wipe off its “entitlement” and “break its hegemony” is the most powerful motivation for a lot of politicians. The way I look at it is that there is an ongoing mud fight among the ethnic elites for domination of the State. So, most elites will likely coalesce around President William Ruto with the intention of sidelining, marginalising and replacing the Central Kenya power elite around the hearth and largesse of government, expand government so that there is more room for everyone and proceed to eat meat while their former Central Kenya friends watch on in hunger. That is problem number three.
Political formations taking shape
The bucket’s fourth problem is the brilliant and great promise of Gen Z. In 2022, eight million Gen Z’s were qualified to vote, or 28 per cent of the electorate. Only 10 per cent, or 2.3 million, registered to vote for various reasons, top among them the fact they did not have IDs. By 2027, the youth will constitute a group capable of determining the outcome of the election.
Question is: Does President Ruto strike you like the kind of person who would run traffic lights and break the speed limit in a mad rush to get to the office to issue youth with IDs so that they can vote for Senator Okiya Omtata? You don’t even have an electoral commission or timetable to have one. The great Gen Z promise will likely remain just that.
The final problem for our bucket is the numbers and how they are distributed among the political formations now taking shape. Now, being horrible at maths and taking huge liberties, here is a simple division of the 2022 votes among the emerging alliances, purely for analysis:
We are likely to have two big alliances in 2027: Mt Kenya will team up with Ukambani while the old KAMATUSA will team up with Coast, NFD, Western and Nyanza. There are two cosmopolitan regions—Nakuru and Nairobi—so I’ll award Nairobi to KAMATUSA and Nakuru to the Mt Kenya alliance. Rough numbers show that KAMATUSA would have as many as 13 million votes and the other alliance only about half of that. Of course there is room for surprises.
Unless the bucket rewrites the political rules and radically changes the “goatocracy”, it’s staying in the cell.
Mr Mathiu, a media consultant at Steward-Africa, is a former Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group. [email protected]
