Perhaps my favourite election-related story is one from well over 10 years ago, when two men were arrested while on their way to a political rally somewhere in rural Kenya.
The reason for this arrest was that they were – very carefully – carrying a concealed beehive, which it turned out that they intended to toss into a crowd gathered to attend a political rally in a nearby village.
It was later revealed they had been paid to find a way to deny a certain candidate the opportunity to address his followers at that rally.
This innovation – of using a beehive or the purpose of disrupting a political rally – was at once amusing and horrifying. Amusing because it is not something that would have occurred to most of us in a thousand years. You have to marvel at a brain that could come up with such a cost-effective scheme to create pandemonium at a political rally.
And horrifying because of the damage it could do: it is virtually impossible to stand still and remain calm when wild bees are attacking you, and a monumental stampede was guaranteed at that venue if the bees were released.
A beehive tossed into a crowd has something in common with a full cinema hall in which a small electric fire starts in a corner: what will lead to the most injury or death is the trampling underfoot of those who fall as the panicked crowd stampedes towards any available exit point.
Of interest here is that political rallies back then involved far fewer people than they do now. And it is a sad judgement on the state of our economy that so many unemployed young men and women can be found, on virtually any day, to fill up the streets of some small township, or some local sports field.
Even at the height of the economic stagnation that came during the latter days of the President Daniel Moi era, you had to schedule a political rally for the weekend if you wanted a huge turnout. During the rest of the week, people even in the poorest villages had better things to do.
Nowadays we see videos of vast crowds turning out in every corner of the country, and for each of the major political formations, on just about any day of the week.
The agreeable side to this story – and something rather flattering to us as a nation, given our recent history of election-related violence – is that these crowds are largely peaceful. No sign of any beehives, or other innovations for putting an immediate end to a rival’s political rally.
The sad part of it is that there are so many young Kenyans who have nothing else to do – no viable farms to attend to; no micro-enterprises; no opportunities to pursue.
And this brings me to what may be the most worrying feature in all this:
Being part of a very large crowd cheering on one’s favoured politician has a very intoxicating effect. It supports a powerful illusion of inevitable victory. You look at just how many and how enthusiastic the crowd is, and you think, “How can our candidate lose?”
I say this is worrying because over the years I have had many conversations with men and women who believed their candidate had been rigged out, and many of the arguments about such rigging begin with the words, “Did you see how much larger our crowds were (than the rival candidates)?”
And so, I would ask: Assuming that those large crowds are not merely bored idlers and hired layabouts as some claim; suppose they in some way represent the true popularity of one candidate or another; how will this multitude of political partisans be persuaded that their candidate has actually lost when the final vote tally is in?
And if convinced that their candidate was the victim of rigging, will they then shrug their shoulders and quietly go about their usual routine, whatever that may be?
Or will they seek to attack the people within that village or clan, who they will believe were part and parcel of this rigging effort that denied their candidate his or her rightful share of votes?
