I recently came across a news item that had the headline, “If you have not begun to campaign for the 2027 election, you have already lost”.
Or something like that.
It is the kind of headline that might normally have been regarded as something of a joke. Only we hear politicians talking like that all the time.
Whether it is MPs who dream of being elected governor. Or governors who plan to seek reelection. Or even ambitious MPs who feel that if the current Deputy President, Rigathi Gachagua, could rise to that high office after just one term in parliament, then so can they.
All these are at various stages of making plans for victory in 2027. And a few have even spoken of aiming for the presidency in 2032 – projecting that Dr William Ruto will be hard to beat in the 2027 presidential election, and so planning for the election after that.
It wasn’t always like this.
If you are over 50 years old and have a longstanding interest in politics, then very likely at some point in the 1990s up to the 2000s, you would have been asked to lend a hand in mobilising political support for one candidate or another.
What would happen is that someone close to you – a family friend; a family member; an old school friend – would approach you about a year to the next general election; tell you they had decided to heed the call to leadership; and ask for your assistance in this noble undertaking.
The important thing to note here is that reference to “about a year to the next general election”.
Back then, the idea of anyone starting to campaign a clear three or four years before the next general election would have been considered to be sheer madness. This would be seen as a case of revealing your ambitions too early and giving your enemies plenty of opportunity to cut you down.
Even the most prominent of politicians – Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibaki – would often keep their supporters guessing as to whether or not they would in time present themselves as candidates for the presidency.
So, what changed?
To a large part, it is due to the success of our current president, Dr William Ruto, in ascending to the presidency in the face of a clear rejection by his predecessor who had previously sworn to support him.
Rather than wait for President Uhuru Kenyatta to give him the massive vote bloc of Central Kenya on a silver platter, Dr Ruto spent virtually every weekend right from 2017, campaigning in every small township and village of that region. And in the end, it paid rich dividends.
That Dr Ruto's multi-year campaign should in the end have proved successful in getting those critical votes from Central Kenya, created a completely new political paradigm.
However such a paradigm may have been new to Kenya, but it was not unheard of elsewhere. In the US, the success of President Bill Clinton in getting a second term was often credited to the fact that from the moment that he entered the White House to begin his first term as president, he never stopped campaigning.
Of course, what constitutes “campaigning” is very much subject to interpretation.
In the old days, as I remember, you could see a top civil servant (say, a Permanent Secretary, for example) spend weekend after weekend raising funds for churches and schools in his “ancestral village” and surrounding areas. If asked if he had political ambitions, he would flatly deny this, and say that he was merely responding to the requests made by his clansmen that he help them “develop” that area which had been so tragically neglected.
Then six months to the election, he would announce that the good people of that constituency had left him no choice given their desperate pleading that he accept their votes and go to parliament to help them “get more development”.
Such an approach to politics now seems to be hopelessly genteel and quaint. Politics is now very much a bare-knuckled affair. And to have any hope of victory, you have to start out very early, and campaign relentlessly for years.