I recently came across a news item with the headline ‘17,000 pupils given shoes in Meru for hygiene’.
The details revealed that the Kenya Red Cross Society, in partnership with Meru woman representative Florence Kajuju, had presented these shoes at a ceremony held at a local primary school.
This reminded me of a man I once read about, Achille Lauro, an Italian shipping magnate and a very colourful politician.
One book on the Italian politics of the early post-war period has this to say about him: “Elected Mayor of Naples in 1951, Lauro was reelected in 1956 and again in 1958, and became immensely popular partly due to the lavish and flamboyant style of his election campaigns.
These would see him giving free packets of pasta, and offering voters a left shoe – on the promise that they would get the right shoe once they could demonstrate that they had voted the right way.”
Technically, this kind of electoral strategy is known as clientelism – the exchange of goods and services for political support, often involving an implicit or explicit quid-pro-quo.
And whereas I imagine Italy has long moved beyond the kind of brazen clientelism that made the legendary Achille Lauro so popular (and also long moved beyond the kind of crushing poverty that made this kind of politics effective) this is precisely where we are here in Kenya.
I do not know the Meru woman representative, but I take it for granted that she intends to seek reelection. And I would be very impressed to learn that she gave out that large number of shoes without ever intending to ask the parents of those 17,000 children (neatly spread out over five Meru county constituencies) to vote for her.
But back to Achille Lauro, it would seem that there is at least one politician in Uganda who has studied his methods closely.
A Ugandan journalist once told me of an MP in his country who had applied that precise approach to getting reelected: he secretly gave out a left shoe to hundreds of his constituency’s opinion leaders, and promised to deliver the right shoe if he won.
In addition, he bought three large bulls, and had them tethered in a farmer’s compound, strategically located on the main road to the local market centre, so that everyone who went to the market would get a good look at them. And he did this at a number of market centres, with the same message each time: if he won, the bulls would be slaughtered to provide free meat for a great feast. But if he lost, he would sell these bulls to local butchers.
One thing we know about Uganda is that it rarely suffers any problem of ‘food security’ as the staple food there, the green matoke banana, apparently defies all vagaries of weather, and there is always some matoke to be harvested, all year round. But in the poorer parts of Uganda, it would seem that beef is such a rare delicacy, that the mere sight of those splendid bulls and the promised feast was enough to sway a good number of voters.
The journalist who told me these two stories of Ugandan campaign shenanigans asked me if such tactics would be effective in Kenyan elections.
My answer was that whereas Kenyan voters were to some degree influenced by just the same crude clientelism as he had described, there was one other factor that tended to overshadow the immediate benefits which came with the gifts offered during election campaigns. And this that our voters often displayed a visceral need to send a strong rejectionist message to one ruling elite or another at election time. In short, that an anti-incumbent ‘protest vote’ factor, perhaps played a bigger role than raw clientelism.
Of course there is no longer any question of openly bribing voters in this way, here in Kenya. But even if it were possible, there is an odd sense of what some call “a poor man’s dignity” in the way Kenyans will often vote, in direct disregard of promised material benefits.
Retired President Daniel Moi, for example, once had the Kenya Power Company scatter poles and power cables all over a rural constituency in Central Kenya where there was a by-election. Alongside this was the promise that if his candidate won, every home would be connected to the power grid.
Although these rural voters certainly needed electricity in their homes, Moi’s candidate lost by a landslide.
Wycliffe Muga is a political analyst and newspaper editor.