This would have made the city “everyone’s county” as the country’s seat of power and saving the vagaries of elective contests that routinely return governors with little abilities and as much inspiration as mortuary signposts.
Because elections are populist ventures, there is never any guarantee that competence finds its way to the ballot, which is the exact reason the city chokes in garbage, while those elected to run and clean it wallow in incompetence.
In 2017, the Jubilee Party gubernatorial pair of Mike Mbuvi Sonko and Polycarp Igathe was set up in such a way that Sonko, the politician, would have room to enjoy his cantankerous pursuits across town, while Igathe, the manager, would oversee city operations. However, the underwriters of the tag team didn’t contend with power in the hands of a loud-mouthed crass politician such as Sonko.
Soon enough, he ran Igathe out of town, and like a monkey with a loaded gun, he went about tearing all institutions in Nairobi, while running the county like a personal little campsite in a bush, forcing the President to intervene in the form of the Nairobi Metropolitan Services.
Igathe is back trying to capture the top city seat, as NMS heads towards the twilight of its chequered period in control. On Monday this week, Igathe and his closest competitor, outgoing Nairobi Senator Johnson Sakaja, went toe to toe in the city’s gubernatorial debate.
First, we have to be grateful to the organisers of the debate for making fringe candidates face off earlier, well away from prime time, allowing the two front-runners to engage later in an uninterrupted session. I have never believed in the façade of fairness that allows candidates with absolutely no chance in a race to line up alongside the serious ones. It was thus gratifying that the media is also catching up on reality.
The debate itself was quite captivating and well managed by the moderators. As expected, it brought out the stark differences between the two candidates. It wasn’t surprising that Sakaja arrived late. Given the clumsy manner in which he has handled the controversy surrounding his academic qualifications, it would be a stretch to expect better.
But what I found shocking was that he not only failed to apologise for it but also arrogantly felt the need to say he had come late to give his competitor a head start. The senator obviously had a very low opinion of his anticipated electors, his competitor, as well as the audience. The man who made the phrase “Siasa Safi” legendary, did everything to prove it is just an empty catch phrase.
Whereas both candidates came out as prone to personal attacks, the clash between Sakaja’s political brawler style and Igathe’s corporate manager’s mien couldn’t have been more glaring. And this is something Igathe’s handlers didn’t quite grasp.
On every score, Igathe would be the better manager of the city by miles. But since he has to rely on the ballot to cross the line, he has to come down from the corporate ivory tower and get muddy down here, where the brawlers of Sakaja’s ilk rule.
To make it worse for the former Deputy Governor, his opponent belongs to the UDA party, a formation where the boundary between truth and lies long ceased to exist. Recent opinion polls have shown Igathe trailing Sakaja by six percentage points, with just over three weeks to go. Thankfully for him, the percentage of people saying they are still undecided over whom to vote for governor is quite high, at about 24 per cent. However, if I was his strategist, I would keep an eye on the score of his coalition’s presidential candidate, Raila Odinga, whose Nairobi polling is consistently shown in the 60s range.
The question, therefore, would be: Who are these people who plan to vote Raila for president, then vote another coalition’s candidate for governor?
The Igathe-Kaloki ticket is basically a Jubilee-Wiper union supported by ODM. By Nairobi tribal and party faultlines, it should win easily. Indeed, Azimio’s Senate candidate Edwin Sifuna and Woman Rep candidate Esther Passaris are sitting pretty in all opinion polls. So what is the disconnect between the gubernatorial ticket and the other Azimio county tickets?
There is a theory that a section of Nairobi voters loyal to Westlands MP Tim Wanyonyi are protesting his removal from the top of the ticket. I, however, don’t buy it. My view is that Igathe is suffering the consequences of the Jubilee breakup, following the Uhuru-Ruto fallout.
In filling the gap, Jubilee in Nairobi has not done enough to align with the superior ODM networks and structures in the city to energise his campaign. It doesn’t help that Igathe’s running mate, Prof Phillip Kaloki, is a rather colourless politician who doesn’t make up for any perceived Igathe flaws.
If you ask me, since Igathe is well endowed in terms of campaign resources, he should fill a briefcase with money and take it to the ODM Nairobi campaign team and plainly seek their help. Ultimately, his political weaknesses on the campaign trail are a minor affair, if you compare them with the possibility of electing a snake oil salesman who lies with abandon long before he ascends to high office.
There is something else for which Igathe should hold his head high with pride, rather than be made to go on the defensive. At the debate, his opponent harped so much on the fact that he resigned as Sonko’s deputy, painting this as a weakness.
My immediate reaction was that Sakaja wouldn’t know anything about resigning in principle rather than earning a salary for no work done, the latter being a surrogate of DP Ruto, who has chosen to stay in office despite an irreconcilable breakdown of his working relationship with the President.
By resigning as Deputy Governor instead of burdening the Nairobi electorate both with an unnecessary salary and public spats with his boss, Igathe set an admirable example for may on the political arena who would rather die than leave.
I was a little disappointed that he allowed Sakaja to bully him using what should in fact have been a strength. I believe Igathe will go ahead to win the contest at the ballot. But he needs to stop cleaning toilets, serving beer in pubs and playing matatu conductor and go find Raila voters in Nairobi. To do this, he needs to dump his Jubilee shirt and get into the ODM networks in Nairobi.
If there exists any who intends to vote for Raila and not his choice of governor, I believe they are not that many, and their hearts are not that hardened, in my view. He surely knows how to thaw their emotions and get himself elected.
There are only three weeks left anyway!
