Prior to the recent Juja constituency by-election, it was possible to doubt if indeed the Deputy President William Ruto had genuine support in Central Kenya. And, specifically, to question if this support was strong enough to defy the wishes of President Uhuru Kenyatta, who also happens to be the acknowledged regional political overlord of Mt Kenya vote bloc.
Well, the signs that had been trickling in all along, suggesting that there was indeed a strong anti-Uhuru rejectionist vote within the region, is now a strong current that leaves little doubt: It would appear that the previously established pattern of a solid and unbreakable united Central Kenya vote has finally been broken.
So, the race is on. And it is a real race now, not just a mere formality which some had hoped would lead to Ruto being buried in a landslide. For such a landslide was more than likely if Ruto had been up against a vote juggernaut consisting of 100 per cent of Uhuru’s Central Kenya bedrock; and the former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s regional strongholds of Western Kenya, the Coast and Nyanza.
It's back to the drawing board for the “handshake partners” Uhuru and Raila . And of course, the two still have between them, what is arguably the bigger slice of the Kenyan electoral pie – assuming that Raila retains his hold on his various regional vote baskets.
The other sign that the 2022 campaign has well and truly begun, is that political manifestos are being launched – though not at any point being openly defined as such.
Ruto has already committed himself to a somewhat eccentric economic programme, which consists largely of providing loans and grants to what he calls the “hustler nation” – the millions of low-income men and women who are not in formal employment and have to rely on some kind of micro-enterprises to support their families.
It has proved to be an extraordinarily effective political slogan, with every other boda boda rider, and every street hawker or kiosk owner, proudly declaring themselves to be “hustlers”.
The basic idea here is that you can “empower small people to do great things”.
But whether it will in any way be implemented as economic policy, if Ruto wins in 2022, remains to be seen. And at any rate experiments in other countries have already field-tested initiatives remarkably close to Ruto’s idea of national economic uplift through micro-enterprises.
But such initiatives – whether delusional or noble – have usually failed.
For example, back in 1958 to 1962, under the banner of an economic policy referred to as the “Great Leap Forward”, the iconic Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong encouraged the establishment of “Backyard Furnaces” which were supposed to be – collectively – capable of producing enough high-quality steel to compete with the steel production of Western nations which China back then saw as irreconcilable enemies.
You cannot get more “hustler” than trying to produce industrial quality steel in your own residential backyard.
Only when this experiment had failed did China then focus on using the technologically-advanced massive-scale industrial steel production methods – leading eventually to its current dominant position, with China now accounting for 53 per cent of world steel production.
The other example which pours cold water on Ruto’s “hustler” narrative, is the experience of the Nobel Prize for Peace winner in 2006, the Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus.
In his heyday, Dr Yunus, and his pioneering Grameen Bank, seemed to have found a perfect recipe for eliminating global poverty. This was the group-based “microcredit loans” which he first experimented on with women’s groups in his own country, and which initially seemed a great success.
However, the limits of this idea were in time revealed. Although Bangladesh has made remarkable economic progress in recent years, little of this is attributed to Grameen Bank. Also, Yunus himself has had to retreat on some of his more extravagant promises, such as that he would in his own lifetime “consign poverty to the museums”.
But elections are won on the basis of appealing narratives and memorable slogans, not on scholarly assessments of economic options. And for now, “the hustler nation” is proving to be a truly effective slogan.
