According to the polls recently commissioned by Radio Africa Limited, Deputy President Dr William Ruto has a clear lead in the race for the presidency.
The good news for him is that it seems to affirm that the efforts he has made thus far in his campaigns all over the country, and specifically in Central Kenya, have borne fruit. For thus far, no other candidate with an eye on the 2022 presidential elections has worked as hard as DP Ruto to endear himself to voters.
There is, however, bad news as well. And this is that Kenya’s political history suggests that being an early frontrunner in the presidential race will usually work against you.
This early lead focuses attention on your candidature. And with this attention, comes many opportunities for your leading rivals to cut you down.
This pattern goes back right to the first general election held following the return to multiparty politics in 1992. The clear favourite initially was Kenneth Matiba. It is true there were no valid polls conducted back then, but such was the received wisdom at that time.
But this only made him the prime target of the long-serving President, Daniel Moi, who had no intention of yielding the keys of State House to Matiba. And as my colleague Machel Waikenda pointed out in his column earlier this week, despite Matiba’s almost messianic stature at the time, this did not lead to the other two strong opposition candidates, Mwai Kibaki and Jaramogi Odinga, setting aside their own ambitions to support him.
Thus did Matiba end up as the runner-up in that election.
With Matiba out of the way due to illness, and Jaramogi Odinga dead, Kibaki went into the next presidential election (1997) as the clear favourite. It was generally assumed that Kibaki would easily gather unto himself, all those who had voted for Matiba in 1992. And definitely, the combined votes of Matiba and Kibaki could easily have led to a sweeping victory for Kibaki in 1997.
However, by the time Moi was through with manipulating the political chessboard in his incomparable manner, the opposition vote (a solid 60 per cent of total votes cast) was divided between Kibaki and three new presidential candidates, who had no chance of winning but all the same possessed unshakeable regional support.
Once again, Moi won. For under the old constitution, he only needed to have the most votes of all presidential candidates, not over 50 per cent of all votes cast.
Now if Mwai Kibaki won with a landslide 65 per cent of votes cast in the 2002 General Election, it should be borne in mind that in that race – and on the widespread assumption that Moi was free to pick his successor as he saw fit – the initial “frontrunner” (insofar as he had Moi’s support) was none other than Uhuru Kenyatta.
In the end Moi was only able to help him get just about the same proportion of votes as Moi himself had got in the previous two elections – about 35 per cent.
The difference was that – at long last – the opposition had managed to unite behind one candidate.
Then in the early parts of the 2002 to 2007 electoral cycle, it was Kalonzo Musyoka who was the most popular politician in Kenya. But both Raila Odinga and Kibaki overtook him by the 2007 presidential election, and subsequently ended up in a virtual draw, which brought immense misery to the country with the post-election violence that followed.
And ahead of the 2013 General Election, then Prime Minister Raila had such a commanding lead that it seemed he could not possibly lose.
Nonetheless he did lose.
I suppose it is for this reason that Raila, now finally declared as a candidate for the 2022 presidential election, does not seem to be particularly troubled by the early lead that Ruto has taken in the polls.
He has seen it all before. And he knows just how little it means, given the election is still many months away.
As for Ruto, he must now work even harder if he is to retain the lead that his campaigns have delivered thus far.
Historically speaking, the odds are stacked against him.
