A few weeks ago, the governor of Murang'a county, Irungu Kang'ata, made the headline-grabbing announcement that he would not be seeking re-election on the UDA party ticket through which he had won his first term.
In effect, he was declaring that he would no longer associate his political fortunes with those of President William Ruto and was effectively abandoning the president.
Well, Kenyan politicians will tend to move from one political party to another very freely, and such defections rarely count for very much. But Kang'ata’s defection was different. It was widely interpreted as the final nail in Ruto’s political coffin, at least as far as the largest vote bloc in Kenya – the Central Kenya vote, usually referred to simply as “the mountain" – is concerned.
This is not a voting bloc to be taken lightly. Apart from their superior numerical strength and their tradition of voting with great discipline as a united bloc, there is the undeniable fact that for the last five presidential elections, this bloc has been on the winning side.
But why should the defection of just one governor, out of a total of about 10 such governors in “the mountain”, be seen as proof of a decisive rejection of Ruto, by a region that in 2023 massively supported his bid for the presidency?
I think the main reason is that Kang'ata has been very effective at marketing himself as a highly enlightened and effective governor, and a man full of ideas for improving school attendance; for providing economic opportunities; for digitising (and hence enhancing) provision of health services; and much else.
So much so that leaders from other parts of the country, as well as from neighbouring countries, have visited Murang'a to “benchmark” their own programmes against what was being achieved by Kang'ata.
I can think of only two previous governors who had such great reputations for their “development” initiatives: Prof Kivutha Kibwana (Makueni) and Dr Alfred Mutua (Machakos), both of whom served two terms riding largely on the perception that they were capable of delivering transformational “development”.
I would also add that both these two former governors did not get on particularly well with the acknowledged regional political kingpin of the greater Ukambani region – former Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka. But this did not prevent them from securing a second term as governor.
So why did Kang'ata bolt so precipitously from his former close association with Ruto?
There can be no simple answer to this, but I would speculate, first, that one of the reasons is that whereas the politics in Ukambani is a lot more tolerant and fluid, the politics of “the mountain” tends to be a lot more unforgiving and has a rigid “us-against-them” quality to it.
Anything less than an undeviating obedience to the direction in which that vote bloc has chosen to move, is seen as treachery and punished accordingly.
But even more telling is that, however hard a governor may work, the fruits of his labour will rarely be available for harvesting after just five years.
In the US, where a similar political dynamic applies, scholars forever remind us all that people vote on the basis of their “lived experience” and not on favourable official statistics.
So, we have the odd pattern that the benefits of any major political initiative championed by an elected leader will usually only be manifest in the lived experience of the voters, a few years after that leader has been kicked out of office for not doing enough.
All this means that a first-term governor who places all his hopes of re-election purely on his development record is taking a huge risk.
More than having the right man or woman elected as governor, Kenyan voters are also passionately interested in seeing “their candidate” end up in State House.
And a failure to align sufficiently with the presidential candidate favoured by any specific region can deny even the most innovative and visionary governor any prospect for a second term in office.
