Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga battle for numbers

The battle for the magical number 50 per cent plus one has started in earnest between President Uhuru Kenyatta of the Jubilee Party and Mr Raila Odinga of the National Super Alliance (Nasa).

There are only two weeks to go before the presidential candidates present their nomination papers to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). However, both the Jubilee Party and Nasa insiders are spending sleepless nights crunching numbers, weighing up possibilities and working on possible snatch zones, all geared towards one goal: clinching the presidency in the first round.

Although 18 candidates have shown interest to vie for President, an analysis of the 2013 voter numbers and the voters’ register as it was in February indicates that the August 8 race has two front runners – President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga.

In 2013, Mr Kenyatta got 6,173,433 votes against Mr Odinga’s 5,340,546. Mr Musalia Mudavadi, who has now joined forces with Mr Odinga, got 483,981 to finish third.

With a near-consensus that the strongholds of both Jubilee and Nasa are intact, the battle for the magical 50 per cent plus one vote has now shifted to swing zones.

Among the regions considered to hold the key to who will become President in August are Narok, Kisii, parts of the Coast and North Eastern Kenya.

While endorsing Mr Odinga to become the Nasa candidate last week, members of his party, ODM, were seen carrying placards reading “10 million strong”, a signal that the party was expecting Mr Odinga to garner over 10 million votes, out of an estimated 19.5 million. Jubilee leaders like Deputy President William Ruto and Majority Leader Aden Duale on the other hand, have been speaking about “70 per cent plus one”, meaning that they expect their candidate to get about 12 million votes – two million more than the Opposition.

Mr Raphael Tuju, the Jubilee Party Secretary-General doubted that the Opposition can marshal 10 million votes.

“For Nasa to say they have 10 million is just pure arrogance and the typical communist propaganda. All wishful thinking really. We have made inroads in Ukambani, Kisii, Coast and Western.”

Incidentally, Mr Odinga will on Sunday lead his troops to Afraha Stadium in Nakuru, where the Jubilee Coalition was born in 2012 after TNA and URP agreed to form a coalition ahead of the 2013 election. Sunday’s rally will be coming just a day after Jubilee handed nomination certificates to its candidates in that county.

Nasa counts Nakuru among swing counties.

VOTER SUPPORT

As the clock ticks towards August 8, the ping-pong over numbers has heightened amid leaked information from both sides over projected voter support bases across the 47 counties. The psychological war over who has the advantage over the other has reached a crescendo even before KPMG – the company hired to audit and clean up the voter register – concludes its task.

On February 21, when electoral commission chairman Wafula Chebukati released the official registration figures, the numbers suggested a statistical dead heat in the Jubilee-Nasa presidential contest.

The ODM Director of Elections, Mr Junet Muhamed, told the Nation that Nasa has worked out a projected figure of 10 million votes in favour of the Odinga and Kalonzo Musyoka ticket.

Asked about the formula applied to arrive at the figure, the Suna East MP said: “Simple. This country is politically divided into two and this time it is in favour of Raila or Uhuru. So we have arrived on this baseline figures in accordance with our support bases.”

However, the Vice Chairman of Jubilee, Mr David Murathe, was more cautious.

“Let us wait for the verification and cleaning of the register. That is when one will be able to tell who has what,” he said.

SLIM VICTORY

Going by the IEBC statistics, if Jubilee and Nasa were to each maintain the lead in counties they won in the 2013 presidential vote, and assuming the voter turnout margins are retained, then the Kenyatta team would register a slim victory of 7.4 million votes over the Odinga team’s 7.0 million. That means they will have to fight it out for the remaining 4.5 million votes which could go either way or be shared evenly.

This, therefore, explains why there has been increased interest, as well as propaganda, targeting the battleground counties of Nairobi, Kajiado, Narok, Trans Nzoia, Turkana, Mandera, Garissa, Wajir, Marsabit, Samburu and Isiolo as per the 2013 poll results. In these counties, no presidential candidate garnered over 60 per cent of the votes cast.

According to city lawyer Kamotho Waiganjo, the talk about numbers is more a case of counting chicks long before they hatch.

“Some of those areas and counties being allocated liberally (as swing votes) may surprise us by how they will vote,” he argued in a TV interview.

In response, Dr Adams Oloo, who is part the Nasa think-thank, said the coalition’s 10 million votes projection was indeed feasible.

MASSIVE TURNOUT

“Getting to 10 million is an analytical process based on voter registration numbers and existing re-alignments,” he said. According to him, all that Nasa needs to do is ensure massive voter turnout.

Depending on whose technical team is drawing up the list, the battle ground counties keep shifting, hence the different numbers presented by both Kenyatta and Raila backers.

A document by Jubilee seen by the Nation, for instance, lists Kisii and Nyamira in Nyanza as well as Tana River at the Coast as battle ground counties. The Jubilee strategists believe the party’s leadership has made sufficient inroads in this perceived Opposition strongholds and believe they can make inroads for the President’s “Tano Tena” campaign, which is seeking to secure his re-election for another five-year term. In the same vein, Jubilee believes it has turned the tables against the Opposition in Lamu County, also at the Coast.

On the flipside, Nasa insiders believe Bomet, in Rift Valley, is now an Opposition zone – thanks to the Chama Cha Mashinani leader Isaac Ruto’s recent defection to Nasa. Nasa also considers Trans Nzoia as a friendly and not a battleground county. However, it considers West Pokot and Meru as battleground counties.

'BIGGEST ASSUMPTION'

According to Dr Tom Wolf, the lead researcher at Ipsos Synovate pollster, analysis based on the 2013 elections show that Mr Kenyatta piped Raila on voter turnout alone. A comparison of the top 20 counties where Mr Kenyatta had better showing and the top 20 counties where Mr Odinga registered the best results showed that supporters of the Jubilee leader recorded an average 88 per cent voter turnout as opposed to 84 per cent for Mr Odinga. “The biggest assumption is that every Kenyan belongs to either of the groups. The truth is that there is a substantial portion of undecided Kenyans who have to be persuaded either way, hence the importance of a campaign strategy. A good strategy may make a big difference,” he said.

Mr Murathe, the Jubilee vice-chairman, was confident of a good showing on polling day.

“They (Nasa) had the potential to register 4.7 million voters in the last phase of the exercise, while our target was 2.6 million. That notwithstanding, we ended up registering more than they did,” he said.

However, ODM chairman John Mbadi said: “Even with Jubilee’s own definition of Jubilee zones and Nasa zones, we are beating them. From whatever way you look at this, and with an achievable better voter turnout, Nasa has won this.”

When all is said and done, at the end of the day, the question of who will win the presidential race will all depend on how many voters actually come out to cast their ballots.