Nigeria’s presidential election, due to be held on February 25, appears set for a surprising outcome. Several opinion polls rank Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of Nigeria’s previously marginal Labour Party, ahead of politicians from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition force, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

Obi’s popularity rests at least in part on the young voters who have rallied behind him. These supporters, known as “Obidients,” are an important and social-media savvy segment of the layer aged between 18 and 35 that constitute 42 percent of registered voters, with a strong base in the urban middle classes.

At 61 years of age, Obi himself may not be young, but he appears youthful in contrast to the other leading candidates who slur and stagger. Bola Tinubu of the APC is 70, the PDP’s Atiku Abubakar is 76, while the outgoing president Muhammadu Buhari is 80.

Obi is no novice on the Nigerian political scene, having stood as Atiku’s vice-presidential running-mate in 2019 and served as governor of Anambra state from 2007 to 2014. Yet many of his supporters still perceive him as an alternative to the establishment. The other two candidates are Establishment figures with a capital E.

While Obi is neither a savior or a socialist, the Labour candidate and his Obidents have enlivened the election campaign. They have rekindled optimism about the possibility of change and opened a discussion about the revival of a working-class political alternative. Such optimism has been in short supply over the past decade as social conditions have worsened in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s social crisis

Nigeria is by far the most populous country in Africa today. Its 220 million people face multiple crises with which the new president will have to grapple. Insecurity and violence pose a threat across the country in various forms, from the undefeated Boko Haram insurgent movement to everyday crimes and much in between. Inequality and poverty are rising.

Inflation has reached 21 percent, with unemployment at over 33.3 percent, while the minimum salary of 30,000 naira (about US$65) per month has not increased since 2018, fueling a cost-of-living crisis. 4 out of 10 people live below the poverty line, while the Nigerian elites continue to enrich themselves from the country’s vast natural resources, unable or unwilling to translate those resources into popular welfare.

Today, a country that is both petroleum-rich and petroleum-dependent is not even able to meet its OPEC production quota, and there is a local fuel shortage. For a long time, Nigeria has been a net importer of refined petroleum, with the refineries neglected and working below capacity. These problems are closely related to the extreme corruption in the country.

While the Nigerian economy grew steadily during a period of high global oil prices between 2002 and 2014, inequality and poverty also spiraled at the same time. These conditions have only worsened during the period of stagnation and serial recessions that has characterized the past decade.

Among Nigeria’s citizens, there is strong support for democracy  but deep distrust of politicians, political parties, and state institutions. The increasing prevalence of networks circulating fake news adds to popular frustration about the genuine failures of Nigerian institutions.

Breaking the mold

The 2023 election constitutes a departure from the established pattern in Nigeria’s presidential elections over the last decade in two key respects. We are seeing a break with the hegemony of the two main parties, and what seems like a surge in youth engagement.
Between 1999 and 2015, the PDP dominated national politics, winning four consecutive presidential elections, and consistently holding a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, Nigeria’s lower house. The party was a coalition of civilian elites and retired military generals that took power following Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999.

From 2003 onwards, the main challenge to PDP presidential candidates came from Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army general who served as head of state in a military government from 1983 to 1985. Buhari ran as the candidate for several different parties: he finally succeeded in 2015 with the endorsement of the recently formed APC.

It was the first time an opposition party had won the election in Nigerian history. The APC also secured a majority in the House of Representatives that year. Buhari won re-election in 2019, but was not eligible to run this time, having served two terms in office. In his stead, the APC selected Bola Tinubu, a Muslim former governor of Lagos state in the Christian-dominated south and an extremely rich political kingmaker.
For its part, the PDP has undergone an internal crisis threatening its position as the main opposition party. It chose the former vice-president Atiku Abubakar as its standard-bearer. Like Tinubu, Abubukar is a veteran Muslim politician and a very wealthy man, although he hails from the country’s north.

PDP dissenters saw his selection as a violation of “zoning”—the power-sharing arrangement whereby the party is meant to pick a southern Christian candidate following two terms served by a northern Muslim, and vice versa. The disagreement over zoning was partly what inspired Atiku’s 2019 running mate Peter Obi, a Christian from the South, to walk out of the PDP with a group of supporters and join the Labour Party (LP).

Obi quickly attracted an unlikely coalition, garnering support and praise from the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and activists in the #EndSARS campaign against police violence as well as international business publications such as the Financial Times and the Economist. The latter have complimented Obi for his business acumen and commitment to neoliberal orthodoxy.

The apparent upswing of youth interest in the election comes after a steady decline in levels of participation. Voter turnouts in presidential elections fell from 53.6 percent in 2011 to 43.7 percent in 2015 and less than 35 percent four years later. And young people have been even less likely to vote than their older counterparts.

Obi’s electoral surge has changed the stakes of the campaign. But in order to understand the rise of Obi and evaluate the wider prospects for a pro-worker political alternative, we need to take a step back and look at the recent history of protest and social movements in Nigeria.

In parallel to the increase in voter apathy over the past decade, there have been significant episodes of social mobilization in Nigeria. Two notable examples were the January 2012 Occupy Nigeria protests and the 2020 #EndSARS movement. Both had a tangible impact on the election campaigns that followed, in 2015 and 2023 respectively.

Occupy Nigeria and Buhari’s victory

Occupy Nigeria was a nationwide protest movement and general strike in January 2012 against the removal of fuel subsidies by the government of the PDP’s Goodluck Jonathan. The so-called January uprising was the biggest wave of protests since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999. The trigger came from increased fuel prices, which had an immediate impact on the cost of transport, medicine, and food. But the protest also expressed wider feelings of disappointment and mistrust in Nigeria’s experience of liberal democracy.

Trade unions had led an earlier series of fuel subsidy protests. Five took place between 2000 and 2007, and there had also been several such movements during the 1980s and ’90s. In 2012, on the other hand, a new generation of Nigerian youth using social media filled the country’s streets.

This episode did not lead to renewed ties of solidarity between the traditional labor movement and new currents in civil society. In the wake of Occupy Nigeria, civil society groups appeared to be fragmented and mutually distrustful. Unions described the activists as unorganized, disconnected, and lacking formal leadership or representation.

For their part, supporters of Occupy Nigeria accused the unions of capturing the protests and unilaterally striking a compromise deal with the government for partial reinstatement of the subsidy. They saw the unions as being more and more associated with the Nigerian elites in the capital Abuja.

Yet opposition politicians were still able to capitalize on the frustrations, energies, and demands for change that emerged from the street. Three opposition parties came together to form the APC in 2013. In addition to its “progressive” self-designation, the APC ran its 2015 campaign on the slogan “change,” with support from some key union leaders, established civil society groups, and Occupy Nigeria activists alike. The 2012 protests alone cannot explain the APC victory, but they certainly contributed to its legitimacy and success.

Tech-savvy young people, inspired by the sense of agency they had drawn from 2012, also contributed to the work of campaigning and election monitoring. Many threw their weight behind Buhari, the former dictator and “born again” democrat, in a way that resembles the current phenomenon of “Obidience.” Much like Obi today, Buhari was portrayed as a pious anti-establishment figure whose rise was based on merit and who could be trusted to take action against corruption.

In addition, Buhari was more willing to use the state in some domains of economic policy—some even called him a social democrat, albeit mistakenly—and supporters considered him more likely to improve the security situation. As a Muslim with a military background, he was expected to combat Boko Haram effectively.

This sense of hope at Buhari’s election soon gave way to anguish. His terms in office have been a massive disappointment in most areas, although some of the APC’s youth and labor supporters are still backing the incumbent party in this year’s election.

From #EndSARS to Obi

The #EndSARS protests of 2020 came just after the NLC union federation accepted the removal of fuel subsidies by the government in return for promises to revive the refineries and repeal taxes on the minimum wage. The NLC called off a planned strike against the removal of subsidies in September of that year.

The NLC later reverted to its previous position on fuel subsidies. In the short term, however, the move was widely considered a betrayal. The absence of labor mobilization left a vacuum that was soon filled by other forms of action.

A week later, there was a large-scale mobilization of urban youth who were protesting against police violence under the hashtag #EndSARS. “SARS” was the acronym for the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, which had become notorious for its violence against young people. The protest movement also took up the demand for fuel prices to be kept low and articulated a wider desire for political change.

The NLC leadership only supported the protests after coming under outside pressure, although they did not call for a strike. Whereas the 2012 strike had ended after a negotiated settlement with the government, the #EndSARS activists refused to meet public representatives. They defined themselves as a leaderless movement. With a distrustful view of institutions and politicians—and recalling what they saw as the compromised and co-opted role the unions had played in 2012—they insisted that their demands were non-negotiable.

The SARS unit was dissolved, but the protests continued and escalated. On October 20, in what Amnesty called a “brutal crackdown by security forces on peaceful #EndSARS protesters,” at least 12 people were killed in what became known as the Lekki Toll Gate massacre, further damaging the legitimacy of the APC regime.

Coming from a movement that declared itself leaderless, anti-institutional, and anti-establishment in 2020, some key #EndSARS activists have now embraced Peter Obi. There is a striking resemblance between the informal coalition of “Obidients” and the bloc of APC supporters that emerged in the wake of the 2012 fuel subsidy protest.

This should remind us that these mobilizations absorbed and articulated a range of disenchantments from across the ideological spectrum. Those sentiments could be revolutionary and opposed to neoliberalism, or based on a liberal, anti-corruption, “good governance” framework.

While some Obi supporters are avowed socialists, they come across as a fragmented group of individuals, more or less coordinated, but primarily rallying behind an individual candidate rather than representing a form of cross-societal solidarity. Obi may be credited with improving health and education in Anambra during his time as governor, but he is not a social democrat with a positive view of state intervention in the economy. His neoliberal politics and desire to extend privatizations and cut state spending conflict with the Labour Party’s own program.

Trade unions and the Labour Party

The NLC established the Labour Party in 2002. It was originally known as the Party for Social Democracy, adopting its current name the year after its foundations. It built upon a series of attempts by Nigerian labor to establish a party and translate the historical popularity of the country’s trade unions into electoral power, dating back to the days of British colonial rule.

However, a divide quickly opened between the NLC and LP leadership teams. While there have been irregular debates within the NLC about reviving the Labour Party as a working-class party, in practice it has served as an occasional platform for politicians who did not secure a place on the tickets of the larger parties.

The most successful of these politicians was Olusegun Mimiko. Mimiko left the PDP and served two terms as the LP governor of Ondo state between 2009 and 2017, only to return later to the PDP. In practice, the LP has been a marginal party: in the 2019 presidential election, its candidate received just 5,074 out of 28 million votes cast.

When the former NLC president Adams Oshiomhole ran successfully to become governor of Edo State, it was as the candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) party rather than his own Labour Party. The ACN later joined Buhari’s All Progressives Congress, and Oshiomhole was the APC’s national chairman between 2018 and 2020.

Neither the NLC nor the other main union federation, the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria, has previously given overt support to the LP (or any other party for that matter). This year’s election is an exception, although the support for Obi’s campaign has been somewhat half-hearted, with several local NLC chapters and individual union activists continuing to support the APC. Unions affiliated to the NLC had an estimated membership of seven million in 2018.

There have been factional struggles within the LP as well as between the party and the NLC. The union federation has developed its own platform of demands on behalf of Nigerian workers. The demands include a reasonable and annually negotiated minimum wage, free education from primary to tertiary level and free public health care services, an end to the privatization of public enterprises and assets, the construction of “world-class public infrastructure” such as roads and railways, and the revival of the refineries.

While the LP leadership celebrated the demands, Obi has avoided publicly endorsing them. His own program promises to transform Nigeria from a “consuming nation” to a “producing” one.

His chosen means for doing so include support for private-sector investment, “vigorously” pursuing policies of economic liberalization, and further privatizations, especially of the energy sector and the refineries. Obi’s plan to drastically reduce government spending entails public-sector job losses.

After the election

Nigeria’s left and labor movement are divided in their attitude to Obi and the LP. The smaller eco-socialist African Action Congress (AAC) party, for instance, argues that the Obi campaign is a trojan horse. So far in its history, the LP has not been capable of mobilizing union members into the party and building organizational structures beyond a narrow focus on election campaigns.

While the LP may lack those structures, the NLC does possess real organizational weight. However, its unions have been severely weakened by decades of neoliberalism and attacks on labor rights, and the congress does not have a strong network of social alliances.

Will the NLC be able to build on the historic base and structures of Nigerian trade unionism and turn the LP into an effective working-class party? And will the federation be willing and able to hold Obi accountable if he becomes Nigeria’s president?

The NLC held its national delegates’ conference on February 7 and 8 this year. Obi was present, along with the other presidential candidates, and the delegates elected a new leadership team.

While the outgoing NLC leaders had been associated with the APC, the new president Joe Ajero has a more left-wing background, and he affirmed the federation’s commitment to build a worker-centred LP. Ajero has also threatened strike action by the unions if the federal government does not immediately deliver relief to Nigeria’s citizens on price increases and the limited availability of fuel and banknotes.

As with the previous campaign of Buhari in 2015, the optimism that surrounds Obi rests more on faith in his image as a seemingly honest “outsider” than on the emergence of coherent and democratic institutions that could hold leaders accountable to the popular movements that give them strength. A victorious Obi would likely seek to reinvigorate the fight against corruption and embrace a more liberal economic direction in a departure from the unsuccessful statist experiments pursued by the Buhari administration.

However, even if Obi wins the election, he will face opposition from a parliament that will probably still be dominated by the established parties and politicians. And should he nonetheless succeed in pushing through his desired return to a more market-oriented path, this would only deepen Nigeria’s lingering crisis driven by poverty and inequality.

In this respect, an Obi administration would not differ much from one run by  Tinubu or Atiku. Indeed, the three leading candidates have all declared their intentions to again attempt to remove the fuel subsidies. The NLC has attacked these proposals and demanded concrete plans to revive the country’s refineries and provide Nigerian workers with decent jobs. If fuel subsidies are removed amid the wider economic crisis, we could see another dramatic upsurge of popular protests. The outcome, though, will depend on whether Nigerian youth and trade unions are ready to finally take charge of their own political future—within or outside of the LP—rather than continually serve to elevate the next ruling-class messiah.

Camilla Houeland is a researcher at the Fafo, Norway, and associate professor II in Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

Europeans love to start the day with a little piece of Africa. Coffee for mum, tea for dad, chocolate for the little one and a banana pocketed on the fly by the teenager for the bus ride to school. Europeans know that their prosperity is built on the work of others. They know that without the oil extracted by workers in Nigeria, the coltan supplied by traders in Congo, and the uranium produced by miners in Chad, their cars wouldn’t run, their phones wouldn’t work and their homes would soon go dark. Yet, how many Europeans are able to locate the capital of Nigeria, Chad or Congo on a map? A kindergarten child can easily name several African mammals, but few would ever suggest the child memorize the name of an African language, society or personality. How can a civilization that thrives on labor in the Global South be so indifferent to these societies?

The literature provides three answers to that question. The first says roughly: It’s capitalism. Capitalism masks social relations. In order to live, workers must produce goods or provide services. But the market-based exchange of commodities transforms relations between workers. Social relations are primarily experienced as “relations between things.” This is what Karl Marx calls “commodity fetishism.” Relationships of production disappear from the field of vision. We end up treating commodities as if they had an intrinsic value, independent of the labor that produces them. Hungarian philosopher György Lukács adds that capitalism reifies social relations. Social relations are objectified, while individuals are plunged into a contemplative stance. Passive, apathetic, depoliticized: the consumer is a spectator.

While Marx and Lukács explain very well how one can use a product every day without knowing anything about the worker who produced it, they don’t tell us why certain workers, certain societies or certain groups are particularly obscured in the culture of capitalism. The economist Samir Amin would answer that capitalism only extends globally through “unequal exchange.” Colonial domination cut the world into two types of capitalist development: the self-centered capitalism of the center, with market growth, rising wages, and consumption. And the extroverted capitalism of the periphery, export-oriented and therefore without significant wage growth. This unequal division of labor logically leads to unequal awareness. While workers in the Global North may be indifferent to the fate of workers in the Global South, the reverse is not true. You can bet that a random Senegalese can name far more French cities than a random French person can name Senegalese cities.

Another form of response however would point less to capitalism and more to the state. In “The Social Production of Indifference,” the British anthropologist Michael Herzfeld shows that bureaucracy treats individuals not as persons but as “cases.” Following Max Weber, Herzfeld shows that the centralization of state power drives a rationalization of practices and a division of bureaucratic labor. The accumulation of knowledge, the creation of specialized services and the professionalization of expertise follow suit. But bureaucratization also increases social distancing. Individuals are no longer linked to each other by face-to-face relations, but by all sorts of “invisible threads:” legal categories, statistics, formalities. French sociologist Béatrice Hibou adds that, contrary to what is often thought, neoliberalism does not debureaucratize. On the contrary, it adds new forms of distancing: numerical indicators, benchmarking, and management techniques. Here again, the problem is more general than the relationship between Europeans and Africans. But colonization has also left its mark on the bureaucratic trajectory. Post-colonial bureaucracy is indifferent to the fate of peripheral populations. Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembé calls this “government by neglect.” It’s the exercise of power through abandonment, relegation, and invisibilization. We end up relying on experts and specialists, rather than considering problems for ourselves. Eventually, we hope, someone in charge will take care of the looming problem for us.

A third type of response of course is racism. Racial theory and the dissemination of technologies of division (apartheid, segregation, border closures, encampment) have separated emotional communities. White people do not feel concerned with Black issues; they live in the comfortable quietness of what the philosopher Charles W. Mills calls “White Ignorance.” But indifference also comes from a denial of race. For US-American sociologists Tyrone A. Forman and Amanda E. Lewis, indifference is a new form of racism. While earlier racism was explicit, contemporary racism is less so. When asked about the plight of non-white people, white Americans used to justify their misfortunes on the grounds of biological or cultural inferiority. Today, Forman and Lewis explain, they are content to just ignore it. Pretend to see nothing of the differences so as not to have to worry about them: “Racial apathy and White ignorance (i.e., not caring and not knowing) are extensions of hegemonic color-blind discourses (i.e., not seeing race)”.

Of course, the question of Europe’s indifference to the fate of the rest of the world is an old one. But this question is particularly acute today. The gap between the rapid flow of information and the indifference shown to certain population groups has never been wider. The number of drowning deaths in the Mediterranean (several thousand), the number of people suffering from hunger in Somalia (several hundred thousand), or the number of direct victims of the war in Ethiopia (more than half a million) are all widely ignored. When Europeans read in the newspapers that the war waged by the government of Ethiopia has killed more people than the war in Ukraine, their reflex is to compartmentalize by relegating it a war far away in an exotic place. Chances are they will close the journal before ever realizing that the coffee they are drinking is from there.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

In an article on this forum on 15 July 2022 titled Why Ruto is Unlikely to Succeed Uhuru, I strongly argued that given historical precedent in Kenya and the dictates of the laws of the dialectics, William Ruto was unlikely to win the presidency in the August 2022 elections. I nevertheless concluded that whereas historical precedent and dialectical odds dictated that Ruto was absolutely destined to lose the election, there was the slim chance that he could win, but that a Ruto victory “would be such an extraordinary accomplishment given historical precedent and dialectical dictates, that it would lead us to rethink and re-theorise our political realities and possibilities”.

Since the announcement of the election results and the declaration of William Ruto as winner of the presidency, I have received many messages asking when I am going to “rethink and retheorize” Kenyan electoral politics in light of my strong arguments of 15 July 2022 that did not come to pass as anticipated. This article is a brief attempt at a response to these inquiries. A substantive coverage of Kenya’s experience with electoral politics under the multiparty system, complete with the shenanigans that go with it is contained in a full chapter in my forthcoming monograph, Kenya and the Politics of a Postcolony. In this article, I frame my rethinking of the 2022 presidential election results in terms of four factors as follows.

First, I clearly misinterpreted the law of the negation of the negation with reference to the fallout between then President Uhuru and his Deputy Ruto with which, I argued, the country seemed to have spiralled back to the fallout between President Jomo Kenyatta and Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Despite Kenya’s democratic advance, I concluded that, “Just like Jaramogi before him, it is highly unlikely that Ruto will succeed Uhuru come 9 August 2022, the new political dispensation notwithstanding.” Yet in the same paragraph, I noted that despite the fallout between Uhuru and Ruto, given the democratization process in the country, we are at a higher level of social and political development, complete with a new constitutional dispensation: “Indeed, had it not been for the new constitution – born of this process – Deputy President William Ruto would long have been sacked and rendered into political oblivion.” This is what should have informed my conclusion.

Given the authoritarian political dispensation of his time, President Jomo Kenyatta orchestrated the marginalization of his vice president, Jaramogi, from power once they fell out over matters of policy and ideology in 1966. Jomo went so far as to put Jaramogi under house arrest in 1969 following the riot by Jaramogi’s supporters on the occasion of Jomo’s official opening of the “Russia” (New Nyanza) Hospital in Kisumu. In other words, Jomo completely neutralized Jaramogi, politically speaking, for the rest of his presidency.

For his part, given the new political dispensation of Kenya’s Second Republic, Uhuru could not sack Ruto even after they fell out following the Uhuru-Raila “Handshake” of March 2018. All President Uhuru could do was to be heard in public rallies pleading with his deputy to resign his untenable position so as to allow him pick someone who could help him execute his political agenda. In other words, although the country seemed to have spiralled back to the days of Jomo and Odinga, given the political developments occasioned by the democratic reform movement, we were at a higher level of social development, which rendered President Uhuru incapable of neutralizing Deputy President Ruto.

This leads to the second factor, which Deputy President William Ruto fully exploited to advance his way to the presidency. Despite the return to multiparty politics, the Kenyan electoral process is structurally rigged to the advantage of the incumbent president and political party through the use of public resources, mass media, and control of social disinformation. Ruto took great advantage of this reality. Once he was marginalized by the “handshake”, and given the constitutional context in which the president could not sack him, Ruto ended up having a field day campaigning for the presidency for the entire second term of Jubilee’s tenure in power. Utilizing state resources and largesse, Ruto began traversing the country as early as March 2018, campaigning for the presidency, taking credit for the positives of the Jubilee government and blaming its failings on the “Handshake”. His presence and recognition in every nook and cranny of Kenya was a function of this factor, which served him to great advantage.

Despite the return to multiparty politics, the Kenyan electoral process is structurally rigged to the advantage of the incumbent president.

Third, and as a corollary to the foregoing, the Azimio grouping succumbed to what one could call the “mantra of politics as usual”, at least in the Kenyan context. Their erstwhile thinking was that their figurehead, Raila, had been rigged out at the previous three elections by incumbent heads of state. Now that he had partnered with the incumbent government (the so-called deep state), and secured the president’s support, his victory was assured. Accordingly, the Azimio people did not bother to aggressively campaign and even secure their vote in “hostile” territory, imagining that the “deep state” had already done it for them. Meanwhile, Ruto and Kenya Kwanza propagated the populist myth of Hustlers vs. Dynasties, which was music to the ears of the majority voters whose generation, born in the age of democracy, has no idea of the sacrifices of blood, sweat, and tears that went into enacting political reform in Kenya, and who the main political activists were.

The fourth factor that secured victory for the “hustler nation” was ballot rigging at the grassroots, particularly in the Kenya Kwanza strongholds of the North Rift Valley and Central Kenya. During the elections, the Azimio people ran off to secure the votes in their own strongholds, without caring about the votes in their disadvantaged areas. There were literally no Azimio agents in the entire Central Kenya voting region and nor was there a strong presence of Kenya Kwanza agents in Azimio’s Nyanza region. As Zaccheaus Chesoni, then Chair of the Electoral Commission of Kenya once quipped following the 1992 multiparty elections in response to a question by Nation Media’s Kamau Ngotho, “Look at it this way, the opposition had no agents in many of the far-flung Kanu zones. Neither were there election observers in many areas where Kanu had support. So, what could have stopped Kanu from exaggerating its figures?” In acknowledging this in 1995, Chesoni inadvertently indicted the Electoral Commission of which he was Chair. There is no way KANU agents could have exaggerated their votes without the collusion of the ECK personnel who were in charge of the electoral process.

The disagreement within the IEBC in the run-up to the declaration of presidential results in 2022 that saw four commissioners – Juliana Cherera, Irene Masit, Justus Nyang’aya, and Francis Wanderi – disown the eventual results is ample testimony of the shenanigans that are usually perpetrated at the electoral management board in the name of processing election results.  The great question here, perhaps, is why, after the nullification of the 2017 presidential election on account of the IEBC having “failed, neglected, or refused to conduct the presidential election in a manner consistent with the dictates of the Constitution”, the incumbent Chair of the IEBC was left in his position and once again presided over the 2022 elections whose results were disowned by four of his commissioners.

One big lesson can be drawn from Kenya’s electoral experience. This is that as a country, we may have accepted democracy, but we are no believers in democratic elections, particularly our political actors. The latter are committed to winning elections by hook or crook. The blatant last-minute theft of the 2007 presidential election; the manipulation of the 2013 presidential election in which the ICT systems deployed by the IEBC to tally results “failed”, forcing a return to manual tallying that gave Uhuru a slim victory of 50.52%; the assassination of the IEBC’s ICT Manager, Chris Msando, and the subsequent manipulation of computer algorithms that kept President Uhuru 10 percentage points ahead of Raila in the 2017 elections irrespective of where the vote tallies were coming in from; and the fallout within the  IEBC in the run-up to the announcement of the 2022 results are ample testimonies of this reality of democracy without democrats. Indeed, the manipulation of the results in 2017 was so blatant that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice David Maraga nullified the outcome and ordered a repeat, the first in Africa.

In the final analysis, just like those who took power at Kenya’s independence were mainly home guards and sons of colonial chiefs and not the real freedom fighters, the election of President William Ruto and his Deputy, Rigathi Gachagua illustrates this unfortunate reality in the history of Kenya’s politics that those who fight for political liberation never directly benefit by ascending to power. Whereas Azimio’s Raila and Martha Karua are icons of the struggle for Kenya’s second liberation, Ruto and Gachagua were strong supporters of KANU’s authoritarian system who fought against multiparty political activists. There are already signs that their tenure in office may portend a return to the old authoritarian days of the 1980s. Herein lies the paradox of Kenya’s political development, characterized by advances and self-inflicted retreats.

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This publication was funded/co-funded by the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of The Elephant and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.