Poor turnout at Nasa party primaries must worry Raila

The presumptive Nasa presidential candidate, Raila Odinga, has in recent days been exuding confidence about winning the August elections, citing internal campaign forecasts showing his Opposition coalition bagging 10 million votes.

A veteran of Kenya’s presidential campaigns, who is contesting the presidency a fourth time and has probably engaged the best number crunchers around on his team, Mr Odinga deserves the benefit of the doubt.

No doubt, the Nasa flagbearer also knows it is one thing to admire these numbers behind some computer at his Capitol Hill campaign headquarters and another to get out the vote on August 8.

But his coalition certainly missed the opportunity to put its forecasts of overwhelming support to test in the recent party primaries.

DEPRESSED TURNOUTS

The depressed turnouts in the perceived strongholds of the major Nasa affiliate parties – ODM, Wiper, Ford Kenya and ANC – suggest that the supporters may not be sharing the party leaders’ enthusiasm about the coming polls.

Apart from Machakos, where 299,000 voters reportedly cast their ballots for Wavinya Ndeti in a few hours in the Wiper primaries, other Nasa-leaning counties hardly produced a winner in the governor’s race with 170,000 votes.

Well, Anyang’ Nyong’o actually crouched very close in the infamous Kisumu ODM nominations with 164,000 votes!

But that number of votes, for a winner in one of Nasa’s safe voting blocs, is too low compared to the more than 300,000 for Ferdinand Waititu in the corresponding Jubilee stronghold of Kiambu.

CONSIDERABLE SUPPORT

In the Nairobi constituencies where ODM is known to have considerable support, contests for parliamentary seats attracted turnouts you would normally expect in MCA races.

Granted, party nominations generally don’t excite as much interest among voters as the General Election.

President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee Party blamed its initial nominations fiasco on ‘under-preparedness’ based on expectations of turnouts not exceeding 40 per cent.

Yet Jubilee’s trouble handling crowded polling stations is ultimately the Opposition’s headache.

If the Jubilee base remains this energised and the Nasa crowd keeps cheering from Facebook, Mr Odinga could as well begin writing another concession speech.

It doesn’t help that his ODM party has a propensity for shooting itself in the foot.

MESSY PRIMARIES

Another messy primaries, in which losers were declared winners from the bush and nomination certificates issued to more than one aspirant, has presented the Nasa candidate with the largely avoidable problem of trying to manage fallouts in the party support bases at a time he should be hunting for votes elsewhere.

Then there is the unhelpful gloomy messaging from some party hawks.

Media reports last week quoted Siaya Senator James Orengo, a confidant of Mr Odinga’s who also co-chairs the Nasa coordinating committee, threatening an elections boycott if the electoral commission doesn’t count the presidential election results declared at the constituencies final.

I can’t imagine a better way of making the voter apathy witnessed at the Nasa-affiliate party primaries worse.

The writer is the chief sub-editor, ‘Business Daily’. [email protected]. a@otienootieno