MUGA: Why Maraga may have a chance of winning presidency

A piece of advice that I have on occasion given to young Kenyans who aspire to be political commentators is this: When the next general election comes around, try and get a candidate to allow you to accompany his campaign team as they go around whatever constituency he or she hopes to represent.

My point here is that to understand Kenyan politics, you must study the psychology of Kenyan politicians; and Kenyan politicians (and their key aides) are best studied when they are under the stress of an election campaign.

I have myself been fortunate to be granted “observer status” in more than one campaign and the lessons learned ensured that I am rarely ever surprised by electoral outcomes.

The insights you get from observing politicians on the campaign trail can be radically different from the perspectives that you get from reading newspapers, debating politics with your friends, or watching the evening news.

For example, ahead of the 2023 general election, and at a time when the former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua was widely dismissed as a joke by Kenyan social media commentators, I wrote to insist that this man was a formidable political mobiliser and had to be taken seriously.

Who will say now that I was wrong?

And speaking of insights, one such insight which is relevant to the current political situation, is that the psychology of campaign teams has an odd way of changing with time.

At the beginning of the official campaign period, there is often a high degree of civility all around. By which I mean that if two rival teams meet at a hotel lobby, for example, they will not show too much overt hostility. This is usually because each side thinks they will win.

But later in the campaigns, when both candidates have already spent all the money they had set aside for campaigning and are now in the “beg, borrow, or steal” phase of campaign financing, and when more than one candidate has seen a man or woman who had appeared to be a hardcore supporter defect to the rival team.

At that stage, it would be dangerous to have both campaign teams end up in the same hotel or restaurant at the same time. They are very likely to exchange harsh words and may even come to blows.

And it is the psychology of this late stage of the campaigns that I am concerned with here.

Take, for example, the group that currently aspires to be “the united opposition” to President William Ruto’s leadership.

This early in the election cycle, with the next presidential election about 15 months away, I would wager that it is practically impossible to get any prominent opposition leader to step down and let someone else in the group run for president. Each of them clearly thinks they can do a better job of leading this country than William Ruto.

And the opposition does seem to have – potentially – quite a few key voting blocs likely to support their candidate, whoever it might be, so there is nothing delusional about their hopes for victory.

But if a few months to the 2027 election, it should be pretty clear that Ruto is about to defeat them at the polls, then there will be a major psychological shift.

Suddenly, all kinds of prominent opposition leaders would be willing to step down and let someone else head their ticket. For at that stage, they would be motivated more by the desire to see the current president lose than by any hopes that they might themselves be the next president.

That is where the former Chief Justice David Maraga, currently running for president rather ineffectually, comes in.

Right now, he may seem to have very few cards to play.

But when the moment comes for the leaders in the united opposition to face the prospect of being mocked, post-2027, for allowing their individual ambitions to open the path to an easy victory for President Ruto, there will be a desperate search for a compromise candidate whom the entire opposition can unite behind.

And that is when Chief Justice Maraga (Retired) could suddenly become a very appealing option.