Just a few weeks ago, we saw impressive unity of the many who gathered at Kasarani to launch the Jubilee Party. Their intention was as noble as it was pragmatic.
The nobility lay in the attempt to create a large national party — what in the US is termed a “big tent”
— with room for everyone.
The pragmatism was that DP William Ruto and supporters in Rift Valley needed specific assurances. They needed to know that — assuming President Uhuru Kenyatta secured a second term — they would not suddenly find the President's TNA went its own way, leaving Ruto with only his URP supporters to back him for President in 2022.
So it was absolutely essential this new giant party be created to ensure, first, the stigma of the President having support “only in the Mountain and the Valley” be eliminated for good. And second, so Ruto and his supporters could be certain the DP would have a large dominant party behind him in his quest in five years.
The fly in the ointment in this promising scenario is that we now have a law preventing party hopping six months to any election. Yet our recent multi-party shows clearly that party nominations are always deeply flawed.
In the past, there were many politicians who failed to secure the nomination of the dominant party in their region, subsequently running on a "small party" ticket. At the same time they urged their supporters to vote for the presidential candidate of the “big party” whose ticket they failed to get.
A classic example was Kiambu county, Uhuru's backyard, in 2013 when Dr James Nyoro — who had lost to the TNA nomination to William Kabogo and then decamped to some smaller party — had images of Uhuru Kenyatta alongside himself on all his billboards.
In this specific case, we may be sure the fierce competition between the two rivals provoked a very high turnout of Kiambu voters deeply committed to Uhuru.
Now that it is do or die; now that a politician who fails to get his party's nomination will have nowhere to turn, this is bound to depress turnout.
In absorbing the smaller parties, the President's JP has denied him many potential campaigners on the ground.
It seems that the price of keeping the Rift Valley vote in JP may be that turnout in JP core support areas won't be so high in 2017.