By this time next week, there is a phrase you will hear repeated over and over again, if you have friends who are candidates in the election – and who have just lost despite doing all they could to win “their” seat.
This phrase is “These people do not want development”.
I have certainly been told this many times in previous election cycles, and often this goes on for a year or so after the candidate has tasted defeat in what they had been certain was their inevitable victory at the polls.
It is a strange aspect of our Kenyan political psychology that even the most crooked of politicians, retain a conviction that they are in politics to serve “their people”. Even when talking in private to people they have been friends with all their lives, a great majority of politicians are not likely to mock their constituents as fools who were easily misled to vote for them.
Rather they insist on believing that the electorate recognised their sterling virtues and their capacity for delivering transformational development.
Even a politician caught with unexplained (and inexplicable) hundreds of millions in his personal bank accounts will still insist that his prosecution merely reveals that he is a victim of people in high places, jealous of his “development record”.
It seems to me that it is a necessary part of politics, that the candidate must believe his own propaganda before he can effectively spread it to others. Hence we find that although a good many of our MPs, for example, are men and women who could not possibly hope to earn any sum close to a million shillings a month in any other employment outside of politics, few are willing to admit this openly.
Rather they speak eloquently of their deep desire to “serve the people”.
Likewise, there are hardly any candidates for governor who – outside of politics – would be entrusted with an annual budget of billions of shillings. Indeed, the titans of the corporate sector who do handle such budgets are precisely the kind of people who would never get elected if they tried.
What this amounts to is that Kenyan voting patterns are guided almost exclusively by “identity politics” however much we may pretend to care about “issues”.
For many years I was convinced that the kind of voting patterns we have in Kenya, with its focus on region, tribe, sub-tribe, and clan, was a purely African phenomenon, and a sign of an immature democracy. I believe I may even have argued in my columns that in time we would overcome such an approach and become more like the advanced democracies of this world.
But then came Donald Trump. And then also came the Brexit referendum vote. In both cases, economists made a strong case that voters in the US and then in the UK were voting against their economic interests. And though the margin of victory for Trump, as for the Brexit vote, was very narrow, all the same the outcome in both cases would have been very different if there had been no identity politics at play.
However, that is not the most surprising parallel between politics in the advanced economies and in Kenya.
For as far back as I can remember, when an election was concluded in much of Western Europe or North America, the loser graciously accepted that “the people have spoken” and congratulated the winner. This would happen even if – as in 2008 – the winner was a first-term senator (Barack Obama) and the loser (John McCain) was a far more senior politician being a third-term senator.
But this too changed with President Donald Trump, who has not ceased to declare even now, two years after the 2020 election, that his votes were stolen.
That too is very much like what happens here in Kenya.
I have known candidates who could barely get more than a dozen people to listen to them at any one time. And yet others who barely campaigned at all.
And yet when they lost they had only one explanation for this: “I was rigged out”.
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