This week, I had intended to write about the perennial trend of politicians hosting football tournaments bearing their names over the festive season.
Actually what caught my attention this time was the ridiculous manner in which prize money, in unconcealed hard cash and in millions, was carried around during a few of the tournaments at the tail end of last year.
Kenyan politicians amaze me with their lack of imagination. First, one struggles to understand why these tournaments, which are in fact political campaigns conducted by every aspiring leader from the local village cattle dip chairman to governors and senators, have to be only about football.
Granted, football is the most popular sport in Kenya, but in this part of the world, it is also largely a male sport, patronised by crowds that unknowingly tend to alienate female fans and players, who if you ask me, form a key electoral block. But beyond just gender and football, I can’t understand why more creative competitions aren’t ever added to the roll. I am thinking of swimming, netball, boat races, essay competitions, camel derbies and music contests. There surely must be politicians in this country who want to do things differently.
But this is nothing compared to the grotesque manner in which some of the sponsors of these tournaments were seen moving prize money, in the millions, around the venues. Of course there are many ways to transport trophies and prizes, but you have to remember that imagination and a sense of presence are not items found in large quantities within our political class.
The year 2023 was widely acknowledged as a difficult one for hoi polloi of our republic. There is no denying that this was made worse by a government wallowing in incompetence and totally deaf to the needs of the people.
There must be a school of emotional intelligence where they teach learners that in this sort of scenario, leaders must desist from waving large wands of legal tender at the hungry population, especially after the masses have been made aware that their new rulers now don shoes, watches and belts whose tidy prices are the equivalent of full acres of land in city suburbs.
This obscene display of wealth by people who can’t account for how they made it in just a year disrespects the people and desecrates the graves of those we lost in 2023 for lack of medicine in hospitals, lack of food or in natural disasters aggravated by an unprepared regime.
However, as I was musing about the foregoing, I noticed that the diplomatic row between Kenya and the DRC had mutated into a mini anti-Tshishekedi movement in Nairobi. To be fair, the regime in Nairobi has hardly made any coherent statements over the fallout between the two nations, but when you consider that foreign policy isn’t a credible ingredient of Ruto’s government, the best way to gauge the thinking in government is to head to social media and check out posts by pro-UDA bloggers.
It may seem strange, but the Kenya Kwanza government, suffering serious validation gaps, loves to communicate through its hirelings on social media. You only need to click on four handles on any given day and you notice the uniformity of thought, if any. Unfortunately, even in hiring talent for social media services, the incompetence bedevilling the regime is quite apparent, as most of its social media force is made up of folks without the skills and ability to churn our believable narratives, opting instead for the shallowest of propaganda.
Anyway, from the trending posts of many regime apologists within blogosphere – and you have to understand that most will share only what is sent to them from their bosses or their representatives – the general vibe was that pro-UDA operatives were unhappy with President Tshishekedi and wanted him beaten in his quest for a second term. Many accused the DRC president of rigging himself back in.
Even though President Ruto ultimately joined his regional peers in sending his congratulations to the Congolese leader on securing a second term, his own sound boards in Nairobi had already let the cat out of the bag, with their barely concealed feeling that Tshishekedi was just another Uhuru-Raila project that needed to go!
There is something absolutely hilarious about Kenya Kwanza adherents bemoaning election fraud in another country. It is the typical log in the eye scenario. Truth be said, Kenya’s electoral cycle has become a farce in its right. But in the modern, enlightened world, I also do not believe that one person can and should score a whopping 73 per cent of the presidential vote in a competitive and highly divisive election. The jury is out on whether the regime in Kenya possesses the moral high ground and credibility to point out these things.
Nevertheless, it is becoming clear with every passing election in most of the Africa continent that the systems are set up to fail. With the turn of the year, our own cycle will be back for the 2027 variety in three and a half years. In the interim period, the political class will be haggling over the composition of the IEBC and the environment in which the elections will be conducted.
No matter who finally gets to fill up the vacant seats of commissioners and chair of the electoral agency, there will be deep discussions on their ethnic backgrounds, who their relatives in high places are and who they have hobnobbed with in their professional lives; these pieces of info supposedly making them unable to be fair overseers of the elections.
Part of what I see as the biggest problem with elections in our continent is the emergence of what I would call the “children of poverty”, people whose childhoods had a deprivation background and who are proud of their journey out of poverty, seeking power merely to enrich themselves to the levels of previous rulers; in the shortest time possible.
For them, systems and institutions be damned; if the election can be manipulated, so be it. This is the variety that walks into power with the pride of peacocks, but the greed of pigs. This greed feeds the sustenance of fraudulent elections, with an eye on state coffers and public wealth.
Ultimately, I foresee, at least in the short term, voter apathy becoming prevalent in most elections in Africa, with the widespread feeling that results are predetermined and electoral systems lack the credibility to carry the aspirations of the masses. But the human being is a species that hardly lives in a cage. With time, as the ballot loses its allure as a tool of change, people yearning for this change, and already oppressed to the ground with no other direction to go but up, will obviously begin to find other means to assert their will and install the rightful mandates.
I have no idea what other tools are available. Neither am I competent enough to judge the credibility, or lack thereof, of the just concluded elections in the DRC. But I know for certain that fraudulent elections, repeated over and over again, are running out of their sustainability index.
It would be easier if those who rise to power through these disputed elections actually performed well enough in government to blunt the pain of stolen elections, but as they famously say in Africa, stealing the village drum is the easy part. Finding a place to beat the drums is the more difficult task.
The writer is a political commentator