FOR the first time, the bloc and battle lines have remained unchanged at the halfway mark of a first term, or indeed any other term, in a Presidential tenure.
Uhuru Kenyatta won the popular vote at the March 4, 2013, Presidential election with 6,173,433 votes to Raila Odinga’s 5,340,546 and Musalia Mudavadi’s 483,981.
Their percentage points were 50.51 per cent, 43.7 and 3.96 per cent, in that order.
Uhuru won in 20 counties and Raila in 26. Of counties with a 25 per cent vote, Uhuru had 33, Raila 30, and Mudavadi three.
Kenyans remain locked into these patterns in March 2015. Going forward, Raila and his co-principals in the opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy – Kalonzo Musyoka and Moses Wetang’ula – are quietly vowing to personally ensure that the voter registration for the 2017 race is so massive, indeed so complete, that the next Presidential race will be an avalanche victory for their candidate.
They want to bury the Jubilee administration’s ‘Tyranny of Numbers’ narrative of 2013 once and for all.
President Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto will never again enjoy the stunning element of complete surprise of the 2013 race, whereby they pulled off the feat of uniting the Kikuyu and Kalenjin vote blocs on one Presidential election ticket.
Unlike 2013, when he was neither incumbent President nor free of the ICC charges, both of which he is now, Uhuru will have a first-term track record to defend. He is now at the 24-month mark, or the exact midpoint, of that first term, and it is a very mixed record already, especially on the vexed question of rampant corruption.
UhuRuto want a second term as fiercely as they needed the first term, when both were ICC crimes against humanity suspects. Ruto’s case rumbles on and there are quiet fears that the ICC judges could move to save prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and the court’s face, to the DP’s detriment.
All signs are that the 12th general election will see the biggest voter registration drives in Kenyan electoral history. What’s more, this time the desperation to win will be all on the other side – the opposition – particularly if their unified candidate is Raila.
Raila will be aged 73 in 2017, and the race will be his third in a row against an incumbent who happens to be from the Mt Kenya region. If he loses that race, he will most likely never stand again.
From where Uhuru is sitting, Raila MUST lose that race. The epic Kenyatta versus Odinga political rivalry began in 1966 will reach one of its many culminations at the 2017 Presidential race. Over the years, it has reared its head even when an Odinga was not a contender, for instance at the 2002 race in which Raila unreservedly endorsed Mwai Kibaki against Uhuru as Daniel Moi stepped off the stage – and Kibaki trounced the younger man.
The 2017 Kenyatta versus Odinga clash could have one of the following outcomes: an Odinga dislodges a Kenyatta from State House by either standing against him and winning, or endorsing someone else, who wins; a Kenyatta defeats an Odinga in a Presidential race for the second time in a row; an Odinga endorses an incumbent Kenyatta on condition of some near-future payback.
The last scenario is highly unlikely, but if Kenyans have learned anything during the multiparty era Presidential races, it is surely to occasionally expect the unexpected.
What should Uhuru do to achieve his second and final and legacy term?
How Somali vote was lost
The first thing must be to begin to cut his losses.
He has made no discernible inroads into Cord territory so far, unless the JAP candidate wins in the Kajiado Central by-election on March 16, and even that would be barely a dent.
The biggest loss Uhuru must cut and waste no more time on is the Somali vote. There is little doubt he has lost the Somali vote, which is the size of one big tribal bloc’s, and bigger, for instance, than the Meru and Embu combined.
That vote keeps growing, in large part thanks to Kenya’s porous borders and Immigration and Registration of Persons officials’ corruption. Recently, the Kenyan Principal Secretary for Education, Dr Belio Kipsang’, observed that pupils from Somalia cross into Kenya in large numbers to enjoy free primary education.
Dr Kipsang’ told the Parliamentary Committee on Education that Somali learners end up registering as Kenyans.
“They enroll in our schools and end up in high schools across the country. Once they are 18 years old they acquire our identity cards”.
The Jubilee administration’s initial reactions to the spate of al Shabaab terror attacks that included the Westgate Gate Mall attack consisted overwhelmingly of a crackdown on the Somali community, including in Nairobi. Operation Sanitise Eastleigh, which was hurriedly renamed Operation Usalama Watch.
Kenya’s ham-fisted treatment of both Kenyan Somalis and Somali refugees traumatised tens of thousands. Gestapo-like night searches were repeatedly carried out in entire residential neighbourhoods, particularly Eastleigh. After months on end that included the holding of suspects in a stadium and in wire cages, the security forces reported not a single terrorist, weapon or explosive seized.
All this was not taking place in a vacuum, the world community was watching, including, as always, the academic and research communities. The first major warning from the research community of the mishandling of the al Shabaab terror phenomenon by Jubilee came not from Kenya but from South Africa. In mid-October 2014, the South African-based Institute for Security Studies released a widely publicised report warning that the war on terror was breeding extremism.
Cord, on the other hand, will pull out all stops to win the Somali vote for their candidate. The only impediment could well be the coming new-generation ID cards that capture biometric and Kenya Revenue Authority data.
More than a million non-Kenyan Somalis obtained the old ID cards without the expedient of a birth certificate in a thoroughly corrupt process whose tentacles reached right into ministerial and top immigration offices.
Voter registration and new national database
No administration in Kenya after the Independence General Election of May 1963, managed by the then departing colonial administration, has ever allowed full voter registration on the basis of the ID card system. In its one-party heyday, Kanu always ensured that its heartlands were better registered in terms of ID and voter cards than the opposition strongholds, particularly as concerns the youth.
Now the Jubilee government has created a super database, the Integrated Population Registration System, launched by President Kenyatta at midweek just before he jetted out to Japan. The system is designed to capture the critical ID data of all Kenyans and others within these borders using a single personal identification number per individual. On this platform, birth certificates, national identity cards, passports, Kenya Revenue Authority tax status, National Health Insurance Fund and National Social Security Fund information will be accessible at the click of a button.
Non-Kenyan Somalis have never come under this sort of ID scrutiny, unless they were submitting themselves to UN refugee registration processes and were outward-bound. Depending on its timelines, the IPRS process could drastically reduce the size of the Somali vote, making Jubilee’s loss not necessarily Cord’s gain.
Interestingly, other segments of the population and the electorate could similarly be intimidated by the requirements of the super database into not registering to vote in 2017.
The President spoke confidently of a National Master Database underpinning the third-generation ID card system and its e-Border, e-Visa and e-Passport systems.
The icing on the cake of the new systems is the aliens’ management systems.
All these new-fangled ID processes have to be handled with extreme care and to be kept absolutely apolitical at all times, or they will backfire badly and drive very large numbers of people underground.
Having lost the Somali ‘Big Tribe’ effect vote bloc long before the 2017 campaign, but not necessarily entirely to Cord, Jubilee will need just such an effect if it is to win a second term.
Uhuru does, in fact, have a Big Tribe vote factor available to him somewhere out there, more than a million-plus. What’s more, unlike the vast majority of non-Kenyan Somalis, they will be more than happy to be captured in full on the IPRS National Master Database and to provide the 2017 swing vote.
This is the Kenyan Diaspora, built up around the world, but mainly in the Western countries, since the mid-1980s. It is reckoned that there are at least three million Kenyans in the Diaspora, the majority of them Mt Kenyan.
-the-star.co.ke
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