Fear the Kenyan checklist voter

This story was published by the French news agency AFP on December 21, 2022: “Kenyan shop attendant Winnie Wanjiru Mwaura was brimming with hope when she signed up to be an election agent for William Ruto in the August 9 polls and elated when he became president.

“But barely 100 days after the rags-to-riches businessman took office on September 13, the 21-year-old wants nothing to do with him. Life has only become worse under him,” the first-time voter told AFP.

“Ruto came to power casting himself as a champion for the downtrodden, vowing to create jobs and tackle a cost-of-living crisis that has left many Kenyans struggling to put food on the table.

“As far as voters like Mwaura are concerned, however, Ruto has done far too little to improve the lot of ordinary Kenyans in a country where about a third of the population lives in poverty.”

As of the time of writing, the situation was yet to improve with the Kenya shilling taking a beating against international and regional currencies. There have been a series of cost-of-living protests and the opposition Azimio la Umoja One Kenya Coalition Party is threatening to shut down the country due to that, among other things.

However, to focus only on the current high cost of living would be to miss the bigger story about what happened in the Kenya election of August last year.

Class contest

Many argue that it was Kenya’s “least tribalistic” and the most issue-driven election in the country’s 59 years of independence. President Ruto and his United Democratic Alliance (UDA) party succeeded in making the election a class contest—between the forces of privilege (‘dynasties’) and the underprivileged majority who have missed on the riches of the land (‘hustlers’).

The process of detribalisation of Kenyan politics, admittedly, had taken a leap forward when President Uhuru Kenyatta reached out and struck the troubled “handshake” with his erstwhile political archrival, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, in March 2018, after the problematic and life-draining 2017 election.

Within the issue-driven political campaigns of 2022, something new happened. It was Kenya’s most granular election. There weren’t too many grand statements on utopian futures. Both Ruto and Raila had laundry lists of items whose cost they would reduce—unga (maize flour), electricity, fertiliser, interest rates—and the specific goods they would give, such as the Hustler Fund, a quasi-national basic income (Raila had promised Sh6,000 monthly stipend).

The cost of living protests tell us that they were very successful in getting voters invested in the details, and that is no small feat. People like Winnie Wanjiru Mwaura have come away with a checklist of promises, and they are judging Dr Ruto on it.

Performance measure

So, as the cost of living battle rages, there is a lesson about how to get African voters to draw up a checklist against which to measure the performance of leaders. Clearly, portraying a group as having enjoyed privilege for decades and enriched themselves on the fat of the land works.

And, from there, build your case using ordinary shopping items—flour, soap, paraffin, beans and school textbooks. Don’t get carried away. It is tempting, for example, to promise young people you will provide them with a life better than that of their parents. But grand as that sounds, it is not emotive enough. If you told them their parents bought their first car when they were 35 but you will ensure their generation buys theirs at 25, you will get traction.

Talk about things like the cost of getting married. Today, it costs Sh4 million on average to put on a wedding. Fifteen years ago, a third of that would have been enough. Promise a family start-up fund that reduces the cost of starting a family, and the youth will listen. As we now see, you can be sure they will come collecting.

If Ruto is sleepless over the noise and protests over the cost of living, it is punishment for a very successful campaign in 2022 and for his role—and Raila’s—in moving the Kenyan election some steps out of the ethnic cave in which it has been stuck for years.

There are also insights to be gleaned by politicians who don’t want to face this level of checklist accountability. The trick is to promise things that sound big but are very hard to measure. Things like “making the Kenyan economy the envy of Africa”. It strikes the right nationalist chord and the good feeling people like to have that their country is the best.

However, it is also essentially meaningless. Does it mean you are promising to make Kenya the richest country on the continent or the one with the best roads? Are you promising to have a cool capital that everyone wants to visit or what?

For years, Kenyan politicians spoke about doing things for ‘Wanjiku’. Nobody thought ‘Wanjiku’ would write down stuff and keep score. Winnie Mwaura is what you get when they do. That’s a good thing, no?

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3