Everyone has a story of the lessons they drew from the recent primaries held by various political parties.
Well, here is mine:
A friend called to tell me that on the drive to work last week, just before he got to his office, which is – like so many offices these days – actually in a mostly residential area, he saw a crowd of “between 50 and 100 people” just standing around doing nothing in particular.
This was such an unusual sight in that quiet neighbourhood that it left him feeling distinctly uneasy. Any motorist in Nairobi knows that what at one point seemed a peaceful crowd minding its own business, can change – abruptly – into a vicious mob stoning every car in sight.
So, when he got to the office, he mentioned to one of his junior staff that there was a crowd gathered not very far from their offices, which he should keep an eye on when leaving later in the day, as there was something ominous about so many people milling around there for no apparent reason.
His junior colleague only laughed at this and then explained: those were voters waiting to be paid to vote at the nearby school which was one of the polling centres for the ongoing party primaries. They would soon be gone. They had been transported to that location – some distance from the school – so as to avoid making it too obvious, when the time came for paying them what had been promised so that they could then walk over to the school to vote.
This is just the kind of anecdote to horrify middle-class Kenyans. This very crude and vulgar buying and selling of votes, even if this was just a party primary and not the election proper.
The point here being that after they had effectively sold their votes in this way, did these people have any right to expect any dedicated service or leadership from the candidate who had transported them to that place?
And is this not how the vicious cycle of poverty is perpetuated in Kenya? That a large percentage of voters are so poor that they willingly trade their votes for a few hundred shillings: this trend having been made worse by the fact that winning a seat in many cases depends on getting the right party nomination, which is far less expensive than courting an entire constituency.
The question that then arises is this: Why would someone who had literally paid for just about every vote he received at such a party primary, then care about the welfare of people who had only supported him after he paid them?
In effect those party primary voters who were “waiting for their money” were at once just the very people who needed enlightened local leadership to help them with their many problems; and also, precisely the kind of voter who will be guaranteed to sell their vote if a candidate is ready to buy it.
Indeed, it could be argued that this kind of thing represents a step backwards from the days of the single-party state. Back then you could not hope to win by transporting a few thousand supporters to the voting booth during the party primaries. You needed to win over several villages in rural areas, and entire shanty towns in the cities. This involved far more people than could easily be “facilitated” to support whoever paid them. You had to be genuinely popular with a broad segment of the voters.
Listening to my friend also reminded me of something I have seen quite a few times: the righteous rage of the Kenyan political idealist who has just lost to a rival who very simply outspent him; a man whose idealistic aspirations have just been swept away in a tide of cash outlays which in some cases led to even his supposedly “hardcore supporters” deserting him.
Such a man will speak eloquently of how the local voters “deserve to suffer”. How they are “doomed to remain mired in poverty”. How these voters are cursed people who will forever be confined to scrambling for the leftovers and scraps that fall from the tables of the rich.
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