On any given day if you open a newspaper, there will be a report of a politician who has just declared that their victory in the 2022 general election is a foregone conclusion.
This could be a man who was either seeking the seat for the first time or out to retain a seat they already hold. But what I have in mind here is those seeking reelection.
And what I would like to draw attention to is the huge gap that exists between these confident expectations of victory, and the well-known fact that between 65 and 70 per cent of all those seeking reelection will end up losing.
In other words, what we are seeing in those news reports is a parade of political losers. Out of every three such politicians who proclaim their confidence that “their people” will reward their splendid “development record” with a clear victory, only one of them knows what he is talking about. Two of them are hopelessly deluded and heading for disaster.
And yet if you have interacted with as many politicians as I have, for example, this enormous number of doomed-to-fail politicians is hard to explain.
As I have pointed out more than once in this column, when viewed up close, most of our politicians come across as devoted and hardworking public servants who are well aware that the voters can easily turn on them, and so are determined to make a mark.
On whatever day you meet him, and at whatever venue, the average MP, for example, can reel off without any hesitation the details of the various projects that have been completed through the judicious use of his Constituency Development Fund.
For a journalist, there is invariably the inquiry from the MP about whether you know any influential person in the NGO world or the donor community who can maybe help provide additional funds for even more and grander projects.
And all along, ‘Mheshimiwa’ will be constantly glancing at his phone, which he may not be answering, but has never once stopped receiving text messages and calls. If you tell him to go ahead and answer if there is an important call, the answer you will get is, “It will only stress me. About 90 per cent of these messages are requests for financial assistance or something of that kind”.
This is a vastly different picture from that which is painted by newspaper Letters to the Editor or comments on social media, which almost always refer to such legislators as “useless MPs” who voters eagerly look forward to throwing out come election day.
How do we reconcile this dichotomy?
In my view, there are two factors at play here.
First is what may be defined as the brutal essence of Kenyan politics. This essence is that there simply is not enough of the good things that only governments can provide, for every region or community to get ‘their share’. Thanks to some success in universal education programmes and various other initiatives, we have an electorate with soaring expectations – both for themselves in the short term and for their children in the long term.
And as such, no matter how hard any elected leader tries, they will barely scratch the surface of their electorate’s expectations.
The other factor is a more generic one best explained with a reference to the Covid-19 pandemic and the evidence it offers of the constantly evolving (and usually irrational) reaction that we see when people are given ‘the luxury of choice’.
About 18 months ago, when the potentially devastating consequences of this pandemic was first widely understood, there was a deep sense of helplessness and a very real fear that a good many of us would not survive the onslaught of this ‘incurable viral infection’.
Back then, one would have predicted that if indeed a vaccine was ever found, and became available in Kenya, the police would have to be called out to control the crowds fighting to get vaccinated.
But instead, when this vaccine that is a miracle of modern science became mundane reality, what we have seen is the government’s vaccine rollout machinery run into a wall of vaccine hesitancy.
The government has had to implement what amounts to a policy of coerced vaccination.
