Development or clientelism? A response to Nic Cheeseman

In a recent Nation article, Nic Cheeseman argued "Why development is the best way to win elections".

He contended quite convincingly that ethnicity and personal wealth empire do not deliver votes as much as development. I would like to agree with the author on this for the sake of discussing the role of "development".

The kind of development he addresses here is that of "building a school and a hospital". He uses figures from the recent World Bank County Expenditure Report and also draws on Mutuma Mathiu’s article to support his case.

Let’s take the case of Marsabit County as an example, which is deemed to be spending less than 30 per cent on development. To give the benefit of doubt to the County administration, I think that figure would have have missed to capture the money actually spent on development that is not stated as such in the county records.

If you have been to Marsabit, it is hard to imagine that the county is not actually spending 30 per cent of its budget on development. The ubiquity of development projects and the attendant discourse is overtly manifest.

Since the coming of the County government, "contract" has become a buzzword. There are bigger fishes in the contracting scene that also sub-contracts other people on the ground or buy materials or other services from them.

A fairly significant part of the town is plugged into this "contract network" which has become very popular. The governance and politics of the county is therefore driven largely by this contracting business than for example the debates in the County Assembly.

The contracts range from building school classrooms, sections of different county roads to supplying tea and yes, flowers to the county offices.

The popular opinion is that there is a lot of "development going on". The loyalists of the governor will point in the direction of these projects and show you the "tangible results" of the governor’s leadership.

This kind of development also feeds the imagination of a populace whose idea of development is seeing buildings go up, cars on the road and a "per diem" loaded social discourse.

A few months after he was sworn in, the governor moved out of the office meant for him, the former D.C’s office, and went on to rent an office from a local NGO which is associated with him.

This speaks to a paradox of the government doing business with an NGO but not a surprising trend as most of the top county officials are former NGO workers (or ex-teachers).

That’s beside the point though; this multi-million project is still very much considered a big development project, its profligate and non-priority nature notwithstanding.

Could factoring this (if that has not been done already) into the development budget have justified that Marsabit is spending enough on "development"?

Drawing on the example of Tinubu and Fashola’s Lagos, Cheeseman seems to romanticise the idea that development translates into votes. The pitfall of the enchantment with this kind of development, especially in the Kenyan case-is that it glosses over the kind of clientelism that this "development-based" politics breeds and inadvertently disguises patronage politics.

In the case of Marsabit that I have chosen to use, the beneficiaries of the development budget are some business people who "invested" in the elections and are now reaping the fruits or new entrants who after "benefitting from the contracts" are expected to contribute to the governor’s political project, read financing the next elections.