MONDAY OPED - MUGA: Running on 'development record' a poor campaign strategy

I want to return to a topic I have written about repeatedly before, which is that of the strange disconnect, here in Kenya, between how our distinctive regions vote, and the economic development that every region yearns for.

You would think that this desperate yearning for emancipation from poverty, would lead directly to a strong vote for those who seem most likely to deliver economic growth and hence job creation.

And yet it remains one of the most compelling mysteries of Kenyan politics: that whereas in the nations with advanced economies, there is a direct relationship between the state of the economy and the voting trends in elections, in Kenya there is no such nexus.

If politics was mostly influenced by reason, then in a country with so many poor people, and fairly high literacy rates, and given 60-plus years of independence, Kenyans would by now have learned to vote in support of their economic interests.

But when elections come around, it is always manifestly clear that the old patterns of regional voting blocs – effectively amounting to purely tribal-based or clan-based voting – is what defines the decisions Kenyans make at the polling booth.

And though right now there is a lot of attention being given to a supposed ‘Gen Z vote’, the fact is we have seen this before. In previous general elections, for example, we have heard of some young man or woman who merely walked from door to door campaigning, and did not even own a car, and yet triumphed over older candidates who spent lavishly and yet lost by a wide margin.

This was then interpreted to mean that the influence of money (and/or tribe) had been broken, and new voting patterns were being established.

But this has usually been more a result of purely local factors than some seismic political change at the national level. For the overall pattern has been that national voting continued to be influenced primarily by purely regional interests as guided by the regional political kingpin.

And in any event, if you have seen any of those videos widely circulated on social media, of crowds queuing up to unashamedly receive handouts of a few hundred shillings each, in order to attend a political rally, you must have noticed that most of those queuing are quite young.

Surely many of them qualify to be defined as the ‘Gen Z’ cohort. And there they are accepting what is essentially a bribe, in broad daylight, to lend their support – however temporarily – to a specific politician and his allies.

Can we really assume that these young people will then suddenly turn into issues-driven voters, focused on the core challenge of economic development, when the 2027 general election is at hand?

For now, the debate continues, and if you are a regular reader of opinion columns in Kenyan newspapers, you will be aware that there is barely any other topic which troubles regular contributors to such columns more than that of our failure as a nation to industrialise.

This seems to me a very hopeful sign. To have so many serious and patriotic Kenyans agonising over how we can end extreme poverty in our country, must surely count for something.

It is out of such agonising that in time we may yet find solutions to this intractable problem of how to get the average Kenyan voter to cast a vote for long-term prosperity, rather than vote for the man or woman who placed a small sum directly in their hand.

But for now, what we have to live with is a downward and self-reinforcing cycle of leaders buying their way into high office via handouts, along with a dependency on regional kingpins. And it is well known that such leaders, immediately after being sworn in, then embark on a reckless effort to recover what they spent on the election.

Such is our political reality.

But this need not always be the case. History is full of examples of political systems or political trends which at one point seemed deeply rooted and irresistible.

However, a day came when ordinary people started to see where their real interests lay and somehow created a new set of rules for those who aspired to leadership.