Lessons from America on how to report our election next year

What you need to know:

  • Opinion pollsters who did all the surveys indicating an easy Clinton win, and the media that widely disseminated the findings, have all been mercilessly, and rightfully so, skewered.
  • The biggest lesson here is that opinion polling is an inexact science and too often will do the math without taking into account a myriad of imponderables.

I had to eat more than a decent share of humble pie last week. After boldly predicting a runaway victory for Hillary Clinton in the US presidential elections, I was among those who had to watch in horror as Donald Trump made rubbish of all predictions and opinion polls to run away with the prize.

I was not alone. Opinion pollsters who did all the surveys indicating an easy Clinton win, and the media that widely disseminated the findings, have all been mercilessly, and rightfully so, skewered.

The biggest lesson here is that opinion polling is an inexact science and too often will do the math without taking into account a myriad of imponderables.

There will be time and space for fuller postmortems on how we could all have got it so horribly wrong.

But meanwhile, our own polling industry here, the media, and assorted scholars and political consultants are already fine-tuning their instruments ahead of the August 2017 General Election.

We will be watching, interpreting, analysing, and making our own predictions and projections.

After that US polls debacle, and before that Brexit, media, pollsters, and other stargazers will be closely watched. In many ways, it will be a case of the watchdog being in the crosshairs.

It will not help that our toxic politics does not provide a conducive environment for electoral reporting. If today Ipsos, Infotrak, Stategic or any other pollster released a finding that President Uhuru Kenyatta is favoured to retain office, Mr Raila Odinga’s Cord leadership would orchestrate a loud campaign accusing the pollster of being on the Jubilee payroll and pushing an ethnic agenda.

The same would happen if the result was the reverse and Mr Odinga was projected to win. The Jubilee social media warriors would be mobilised to launch a campaign vilifying the pollster as an opposition sympathiser and possible agent of foreign interests.

For the media here, it would be suicide to endorse a candidate, as is the norm in more mature democracies. Any endorsement would not be seen as coming out of analysis of the ideology, programmes, and policy prescriptions on offer, but would be reduced to base examination of the ethno-political affiliations of the publishers or editors.

The tragedy is that such profiling would not be restricted to the eating classes on the high table of the political banquet, but permeate right down to the hungry salivating mobs at the grassroots who have been led to believe that a win or loss for their ethnic kingpin is a win or loss for them.

Yet if we want to help mature our political culture beyond ethnic competition, we must bite the bullet.

We have it in our power as media to advance political dialogue and debate beyond crass ethnic mobilisation and profiling to serious discussion of issues and policy platforms.

Before we go there, however, we must all remove the ethnic and otherwise partisan blinkers from our own eyes.

We must also have in place the instruments to help us better analyse and digest what the candidates and parties promise so that we can then determine which offers the preferable options. But then all these investments would be useless where the contending parties cannot be distinguished by ideology or policies, but only as ethnic alliances.

Today we have Jubilee Party, an amalgamation of President Kenyatta’s TNA and Deputy President William Ruto’s URP, plus a handful of briefcase parties that support the governing Jubilee alliance.

On the other side of the divide is the Cord coalition of Mr Odinga’s ODM, Mr Kalonzo Musyoka’s Wiper Party, and Mr Moses Wetang’ula’s Ford Kenya, now grandly talking of bringing on board other smaller parties under a super alliance.

Assuming that Cord gets it act together, one can be sure that its election manifesto will be virtually identical to Jubilee’s.

It may want to emphasise the fight against corruption, the Kenyatta-Ruto Achilles heel, but will happily embrace the most corrupt within its ranks.

Give me the candidate and party that is really serious about slaying the ogre of corruption, transforming Kenya into a more just and equitable society where opportunities are open to all, and has plans to propel Kenya into the league of developed countries and my endorsement will be clear.

[email protected]. @MachariaGaitho