‘Debt debate’ is a war cry, it can ignite electoral violence

President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto show Jubilee party sign during its launch at Kasarani Stadium on September 10, 2016.

The “tyranny of numbers” formula was hardly enough to guarantee peace and stability. PHOTO| FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Ahead of Kenya’s 2022 elections, the strategists of Deputy President William Ruto seem to have taken to heart Quintus’ advice to Marcus to call in debts, real and perceived.

  • The handshake calmed down political temperatures and brought closure to the 2017 double election, the country’s most protracted and costly electoral crisis in recent memory.
  • The “tyranny of numbers” formula was hardly enough to guarantee peace and stability.

The idea of ‘political debt’ is as old as the hills. In 64 BC, the great Roman lawyer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero ran for consul, the highest office in the ancient Roman Republic.

At 42, Marcus was a brilliant and successful politician. But there was one odd against him: He was not a member of the nobility or “Patricians”, the all-powerful original aristocratic families who determined victory and defeat in the elections of Ancient Rome. Ordinarily, this factor would have eliminated him from consideration.

But Quintus, his brother, gave Marcus timeless tips now re-published as the little book on How to Win an Election (2012). One of these tips was on ‘political debt’ as the kernel of the art of politics.

“Now is the time to call in all favours”, he wrote. “Don't miss an opportunity to remind everyone in your debt that they should repay you with their support.”

But the wise also use election time as the time to incur new debt and win elections. “For those who owe you nothing, let them know that their timely help will put you in their debt”, Quintus advised.

Calling in political debts to win elections has become a noble and indelible feature of democracies. What is new — and obnoxious and utterly undemocratic — is the ubiquity in African politics of the idea that a whole ethnic population can owe a “political debt” to a single politician or his ethnic kith-and-kin.

FIVE DECADES

The rise of this malignant and combustive thought in Kenyan politics over the last five decades has become synonymous with a war cry. In the past, it has triggered politically-inspired violence that has marred elections.

Ahead of Kenya’s 2022 elections, the strategists of Deputy President William Ruto seem to have taken to heart Quintus’ advice to Marcus to call in debts, real and perceived.

However, the context, timing and tactics used by a section of Jubilee mandarins to call in Ruto’s political debts ahead of the 2022 polls is cutting as messily as the proverbial surgery with an axe. The polarising public debate can inadvertently turn the “Uhuru Kenyatta succession” into yet another electoral nightmare and costly political affair in 2022.

The debate on “Ruto’s political debt” has a familiar cause and context. It is linked to the extra-constitutional initiative known as Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), famously known as “the handshake” between President Kenyatta and opposition chief Raila Odinga in March this year.

HANDSHAKE

Blissfully, the handshake calmed down political temperatures and brought closure to the 2017 double election, the country’s most protracted and costly electoral crisis in recent memory.

However, overnight, the pact turned into a toss-up what looked liked a sealed deal within the ruling Jubilee Party to elect Deputy President Ruto as an automatic successor to President Kenyatta.

To hardline Ruto allies, the handshake gave Odinga a new lease of life and squandered Jubilee’s chance to vanquish him ahead of 2022. But the hard lesson from the 2013 and 2017 elections is that exclusionary politics based on winner-takes-all scenarios can never guarantee lasting peace to underpin sustainable development.

The “tyranny of numbers” formula was hardly enough to guarantee peace and stability. The August 2017 results were nullified by the Supreme Court, and the fresh presidential election on October 26 was actively boycotted by the petitioner, precipitating a serious political impasse. In 2013 and 2017, the tyranny of numbers may have won elections, but it left behind a deeply polarised nation.

But equally polarising is the debate on political debts. In the wake of the handshake, Jubilee politicians argued that President Uhuru Kenyatta’s kinsmen owed his Deputy a double “political debt” accruing from his unwavering support in the 2013 and 2017 General Election.

DOMESTIC TENETS

Some, including the maverick Jubilee legislator from Nyeri Town Wambugu Ngunjiri, did not agree. Wambugu based his argument squarely on democratic tenets. Nobody, he said, is or has ever been elected for the presidency of any country “unconditionally”. We should only vote for a leader because of his part in nation building, not because of alleged debts.

Be that as it may, what has given legs to this polarising debate on political debts is a controversial vernacular song released in early July “Hatuna Deni (We owe nobody).

The song caused ripples in Jubilee’s Rift Valley leaders, with some demanding the arrest of the artist, Kimani wa Turacco, who opines that voters from Central Kenya do not owe Ruto anything given that he has also enjoyed an equal share of privileges during Uhuru’s presidency.

Ruto weighed in to dispel the debt claims. Neither President Kenyatta nor his Mount Kenya support base owe him any debt in the 2022 polls, he said.

POLITICAL DEBT

His support for his boss in the 2013 and 2017 elections was not a political debt, and he does not expect voters in Central Kenya to repay any debt when he runs for the top seat in 2022.

Ruto’s biblical message: "Owe no man nothing except the debt of love for one another" is laudable.

Hopefully, Ruto’s message will calm his support base in the Rift Valley. But we must decolonise our minds: The constitutional right to vote is individual, not collective or ethnic.

Prof Kagwanja is Chief Executive Officer of the Africa Policy Institute and a former government adviser.