Who between Raila Odinga and William Ruto will win over the undecided voter? Will George Wajackoyah’s candidacy provoke a run-off? Is the IEBC ready to deliver credible polls?

Kenyans have known for some time that the 2022 presidential election would be a two-horse race between Deputy President William Ruto and President Kenyatta’s favoured successor and long-time opposition leader, Raila Odinga. What some might not have anticipated is that with just a few weeks to go till the 9 August polls, the election remains too close to call. So how did we get here, and what will determine who emerges victorious to take up their position in State House?

Barring any last minute shocks, the outcome will depend on three main questions. First, how successful will Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza and Odinga’s Azimio La Umoja prove to be in winning over the undecideds and potential swing voters, and at maximising the turnout of their supporters? Second, can George Wajackoyah, a surprise third candidate, succeed in getting enough votes to prevent either Ruto or Odinga from securing 50% + 1 of the vote in the first round, pushing the election to a run-off? Third, how even will the playing field prove to be?

Taking each of these points in turn suggests that this election is more uncertain than any since 2007 and that any outcome remains possible.

Ruto entered the campaign period with a healthy lead over Odinga in a number of opinion polls, but that has now evaporated. Almost every month, Odinga and his Azimio La Umoja alliance – whose campaigns have been invigorated in recent months by the selection of Martha Karua as Odinga’s running mate, the addition of new alliance members, and a more active meeting schedule – have added a significant proportion of votes to their tally. On the whole, Odinga appears to have done this, not by making inroads into Ruto’s support base, but by winning over some of the formerly “undecided” and “refuse to answer”. Thus, while 38 per cent of respondents said that they would vote for Ruto and 27 per cent for Odinga in TIFA’s February 2022 opinion poll, by the end of June 2022 this had shifted to 39 per cent saying that they would vote for Ruto and 42 per cent for Odinga. Over the same period, the proportion of “undecided” and “no response” fell from 20 per cent and 11 per cent respectively in February to 10 per cent and 5 per cent in June.

Ruto entered the campaign period with a healthy lead over Odinga in a number of opinion polls, but that has now evaporated.

Opinion polls always have some room for error – not all who say that they will vote are registered to, or will vote, and it is possible that some people change their mind at the last minute. Given Odinga’s marginal lead, this means that the election is too close to call. In such a situation, small things can make all the difference. So what might determine how the elections play out on August 9?

With everything to play for, Kenya Kwanza and Azimio La Umoja are focused winning over any remaining undecided voters and maximising turn out in their areas. In order to understand how they are doing this, it is important to recognize that there is not so much one national campaign as a number of sub-national battles taking place in the country’s former regions, each of which is shaped by local dynamics. In other words, while the state of the economy and the credibility of the candidates is significant everywhere, the balance of power, and the nature of the contest, is different in every area.

In terms of strongholds, while Odinga is dominating his home area of Nyanza, and Ruto has a lead in his Rift Valley backyard, the rest of the country will likely split their vote. While the majority of citizens in Nairobi, North Eastern and at the Coast appear to be backing Odinga, competition remains fierce in both areas. Similarly, while Ruto retains a lead in Central Kenya, the vote in Eastern is divided between the two candidates, and both alliances know that they can secure significant votes in all of these areas.

The difference this makes in the strategies candidates use is profound. Confident of victory in their homelands, Odinga and Ruto are relying on existing structures to mobilise a high turnout in these areas, and devoting more of their attention to key battlegrounds. This is demonstrated by the furious campaigning in Central Kenya. One of the most populous and economically influential regions, and home to the Kikuyu community of President Uhuru Kenyatta, Central is the region that appears to have been the most visited.

Despite Kenyatta backing Odinga, Ruto appears to have maintained the lead that he has held in the region for many months. His success reflects a combination of popular frustrations at the country’s current economic challenges and long-term planning, including sponsoring allied leaders in the region in the 2017 elections to build a strong base independent of Kenyatta’s influence.

Odinga’s failure to win over Central after many years in which the region’s leaders demonised the former opposition leader as a destabilising force is perhaps the biggest weakness of his campaign. Had Odinga secured a dominant position in Central, it would have been extremely difficult for Ruto to build a large enough support base to be a serious contender for the presidency. Much will now depend on whether Odinga, with Kenyatta and Karua’s backing, can eat into Ruto’s support base in Central, or whether continued economic difficulties will rally voters to Kenya Kwanza’s call for change.

The second most visited region appears to be Western, which along with North Eastern Kenya, is split fairly evenly between the two candidates. Thus, while both favour Odinga, the gap appears to be under 10% per cent. Western’s relatively large population, and the fact that Odinga has historically polled well here, while Ruto has co-opted prominent Western leaders in Musalia Muvadi and Moses Wetangula, means that the campaign is likely to be fierce right up to polling day.

Despite Kenyatta backing Odinga, Ruto appears to have maintained the lead that he has held in the region for many months.

Much will depend on which party has built the most effective infrastructure for getting the vote out. It is one thing to attract support in an opinion poll and another to get those people to the polls. While it is normally safe to assume that the ruling party has an advantage in this regard, given greater access to resources and state equipment, the situation is complicated in 2022 by two factors. First, there is no real “opposition candidate”, with Ruto, the “outsider”, having been Deputy President since 2013. Second, the effective mechanisms of political mobilization developed in traditionally “ruling party” areas such as Central Kenya may not benefit Odinga, even though he has the support of Kenyatta, because a majority of voters there are not planning to back Azimio.

What this suggests is that the election could remain extremely close right up until polling day, increasing the prospects for other factors to influence the outcome.

The presidential election has clearly been complicated by the late entry of George Wajackoyah, a 61-year old university professor. Minor candidates tend to struggle for media coverage and public attention. However, Wajackoyah’s manifesto, which calls for the legalisation of marijuana, the prioritisation of snake farming, the (clearly illegal) suspension of parts of the constitution, and (worryingly xenophobic) promise to “deport idle foreigners”, and his populist and unconventional style, have earned him significant media attention and captured the imagination of a significant number of Kenyans (mainly disgruntled young people in urban areas).

Wajackoyah – who polled 4 per cent of the popular presidential vote in TIFA’s June poll – has no chance of winning the election. His support base may also be exaggerated. Many of the young people to whom he is appealing may not even be registered to vote, and some who say that they will vote for him may decide not to “waste” their vote on a third candidate when they get to a polling station. Nevertheless, Wajackoyah – who is currently gaining ground – may seriously upset the election if, with say just 2 to 5 per cent of the vote, he prevents either of the main candidates from securing an absolute majority in the first round.

Wajackoyah has said that “a victory for either” Odinga or him would “be a win”, but it is unclear whether he would be able to direct his largely anti-establishment support base to swing behind Odinga in a second round. The current political uncertainty may therefore last for longer than many are expecting: Kenya has never before experienced a presidential run-off.

The closeness of the race also means that the evenness of the playing field – from media coverage to the free and fairness of the election itself – will prove critical. This will place even greater pressure on the Independent and Electoral Boundaries Commission (IEBC) – at a time when the national press has cast doubt on whether this body is ready to manage these complex elections. In the run-up to the 2022 polls, there have been questions raised both about the IEBC’s handling of the thorny question of whether leaders accused of corruption and criminality should be allowed to run, and about important decisions about how the elections will be run. In particular, the IEBC’s decision to only produce an electronic voters register – with no “manual” copy – and not to have a “live” tally of overall results available online for all to see during the counting process, has led to controversy.

Public concern has been amplified by a damaging war of words with the Director of Criminal Investigations that – puzzlingly – has been escalated by the IEBC itself. Following the arrest of Venezuelan nationals at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, apparently on the basis that they were carrying election materials in an unconventional manner, had out-of-date passports, and were not met by IEBC officials, Chebukati released a statement highly critical of the police, alleging that they were harassing IEBC contractors working for Smartmatic, a multinational elections company helping the IEBC to manage election technology. This triggered an ongoing public spat that has seen the DCI raise serious questions about IEBC protocols and credibility, accusing the “the elections agency of misrepresenting facts, lying and laxity in the management of this year’s General Election”.

Such public spats are particularly unfortunate given that the IEBC was already struggling with a significant credibility challenge due to the fact that its chair, Wafula Chebukati, presided over the 2017 general election that was nullified by the Supreme Court. The IEBC also faces the challenging task of running high-tech elections across the country for six elective posts – President, Senator, Governor, Women Representative, Member of Parliament, and Member of County Assembly – on a single day. In a close contest, any logistical issues, intentional or not, could quickly be interpreted as manipulation by a mistrustful electorate.

The current political uncertainty may therefore last for longer than many are expecting: Kenya has never before experienced a presidential run-off.

These concerns mean that the ability of both coalitions to protect the vote by deploying party agents comprehensively across the country will be particularly important. Here, too, there will be a difference with previous elections. When one coalition or another was dominant in most of the country’s regions, it was very hard for the less popular coalition to post party agents. They would often be intimidated or quietly co-opted by the much larger coalition in that area. In 2022, there are far fewer “one-party zones”, with both Kenya Kwanza and Azimio competitive, if not winning, across much of the country. This means that it will be more feasible to deploy party agents consistently across the country. That should mean that malpractice is less likely, although it might also mean that – if there are attempts to rig the ballot – we see more explicit and blatant evidence of this than in the past.

It also seems clear that the closeness of the election and the fact that both candidates have been ahead in the opinion polls at some point, means that both Ruto and Odinga are confident they will win. Given that they have already also raised concerns about the performance of the IEBC, and in Ruto’s case the “deep state”, this means they are likely to dispute the outcome if they lose by a small margin – especially if there are logistical problems. In turn, this will make it harder to persuade all Kenyans that the electoral process was free and fair – even if it was – which in turn will have implications for the legitimacy of the resulting government.

Close elections, it turns out, create particular headaches for everyone involved. Only by watching how these three issues develop can we understand how they are likely to play out.

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Nic Cheeseman is a Professor of Democracy at University of Birmingham. Gabrielle Lynch is a Professor of Comparative Politics at University of Warwick. Justin Willis is a Professor of History at Durham University.

Road to 9/8: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Towards the Home Stretch: Poll Update in an Evolving Electoral Context

Kenya Elections 2022: Caught in the Middle!

Why Ruto is Unlikely to Succeed Uhuru

Reimagining a Nation: Kenya Not for Two Tribes Only

Faced all at once with political, social, economic and constitutional crises, the English ruling class is invoking the nostalgia of empire in a desperate bid to maintain the status quo against the odds.

Sajjabi, say Baganda, liwoomera ku ngabo. 

Loosely translated: “He may be a bad person, but he sure is sweet with a shield (i.e. a real asset in battle)”, or even: “Horses for courses”, as the English might say.

On July 7th Boris Johnson announced his resignation as UK Prime Minister. He will formally leave office in a matter of weeks. Johnson becomes the third Conservative Party British Prime Minister to resign from the post in six years, and the fourth in twelve. The process of replacing him is underway, from a choice of candidates no better, and in some cases, worse, than he is.

So far, his party, elected to government in 2010, has managed to retain power even while shedding party leaders who, under the British system, become Prime Minister.

This is the latest development in a cascade of events triggered by the 2016 decision to hold a referendum on Brexit—whether Britain should exit her 40-year membership of the European Union or not.

The referendum itself was a product of earlier developments, namely the attempt to manage the political turmoil caused by the long overdue 2008 economic crash, which triggered a panicky “do something” mentality among the political and media classes.

Basically, it amounted to blaming the country’s current economic woes on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The Labour Party’s Gordon Brown, who had inherited the post from the long-serving Tony Blair and with it the downside of Blair’s artificial economic growth, had failed—since he had served as finance minister under Blair—to distance himself from the rising economic drama, going on to lose his parliamentary majority in the 2010 election. Gordon resigned and the Conservative Party formed a coalition government with other parties.

The British public and establishment both could hardly say much else; there are no other explanations, palatable to them, for their current mess.

It can be very hard to recognise a collapse from the inside, but the fact is that economics over there is dead, and this has thrown its avatar called politics into turmoil. And it is no longer politics. It is the ghost of politics: it cannot explain the economic crisis; it cannot listen to experts on the matter of the climate emergency; it cannot even fix basic service and infrastructure problems.

Mistaking motion for progress, David Cameron, after renewing his mandate following an election that gave him full control of government, eventually decided to use it to end the “blame the European Union” debate. Hence the referendum. Unfortunately, only erroneous information was available for the subsequent discourse, and the result was Brexit: a decision to leave the European Union and the vote that got rid of Cameron. There followed a messy parliamentary process to turn Brexit into international and domestic law that got rid of his successor Theresa May, and finally a law in need of implementation that has bedevilled Boris Johnson.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic only served to delay and to distract from this process. But the day came when the confused anger of the British public about why they are so poor while living in the world’s 5th richest country felled another leader.

The underlying purpose to all this manoeuvring had always been one: a mobilisation necessary for the isolation and defeat of alternative ideas that were beginning to take root in the population and eventually found organised expression through a tendency to the left that soon took leadership of the main opposition Labour Party under the beleaguered leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. For all his perceived shortcomings, Corbyn came across as a person with a real understanding of the deteriorating living conditions of ordinary people, and a genuine belief that another way was possible.

The day came when the confused anger of the British public about why they are so poor while living in the world’s 5th richest country felled another leader.

You see, the most contentious question at the heart of British politics for nearly two centuries has been about the best way to distribute the proceeds from their expanding global economic earnings that up to now are a significant contributor to the “British” economy. The birth of the Labour Party in 1900 was the ultimate political product of those contestations.

Corbyn tried to reclaim that old Labour Party from the Blair legacy that had merely been an adaptation to the new economic and political realities began and imposed in the 1980s neo-liberal era under then Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Had Corbyn succeeded, it would have amounted to a near-complete reversal of Thatcherism. A surrender. The mission of the entire political establishment, aided by the corporate media, was and is to defend the Thatcherite neo-liberal ring for as long as possible, that’s all. So Corbyn was vilified, and a national myth, amounting to a dangerous nostalgia, and a distraction from truth, which is its intention, was promoted instead.

This meant the British excavating all those elements of nostalgia that could be safely invoked for the purpose of making them feel good—without exposing the historical seedy underbelly of Empire—as a cultural ploy. Johnson was the perfect tool for this: embodying a pandering to imagery and language rooted in a comforting cultural ecology reminiscent of the Billy Bunter cartoon character and the whole anachronistic Harry Potter ethos.

But British/English identity is a construct of the imperial class. The then nascent bourgeois classes of Western Europe developed two key institutions: exclusive schools and the armed forces, which in turn created a cadre template invested in racism, class aspiration, greed, callousness, cynicism and a fundamentally dishonest ethos. Basically what one would need to be in order to conquer much of the world.

All the branches of the British state have always had such people in senior management.

In this sense, anyone can become, or at least aspire to become a part of the British management class; you just need to have attended the institutions that teach these values. Boris Johnson was perfect for the task then at hand: a classic neophyte, being descended from (white) immigrants himself—neophytes are always more fanatical than the originators.

There is a lot of historical precedence to this. What the English present as a scamp and “naughty boy” is actually a dangerous sociopath. There have been plenty of them. There were the 16th Century sea pirates Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, licenced to pillage by Queen Elizabeth I. There was the consummate conman known as the African explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), as well as Robert Clive (1725-1774) whose licenced colonial British East India Company gave a whole new meaning (and even word: “loot”) to the practice of mass murder and plunder. In many cases, they are discarded and disgraced once they are no longer useful: Raleigh ended up being executed by the very state he had once served, and Clive committed suicide years after being accused in parliament of having enriched himself at the expense of the country. Now Boris Johnson has also been dumped.

Johnson was the perfect tool for this: embodying a pandering to imagery and language rooted in a comforting cultural ecology reminiscent of the Billy Bunter cartoon character.

The rest of the candidates to replace him are largely ideologically the same. Just not necessarily white-skinned immigrants like him. They are made up of the very people who forced Johnson to quit after seeing that his devotion to scandal would likely be a liability at the next election.

Of the few non-whites that have also aspired to premiership—and one remains in the running—their only real challenge is how sellable their dark skins are to the wider electorate that has historically been indoctrinated to dislike, despise and distrust non-white people.

However, therein lies the hypocrisy. Whatever their skin-colour, none should pretend that they did not know exactly who Johnson was; they did. And what he was, was exactly what they needed to fight off Corbyn’s socialism at the time: a typical specimen of English nastiness as perfected by the English middle classes, the cleverest part of which is pretending not to know how nasty they are, and the damage their nastiness has inflicted on those subjected to it.

Whoever replaces him will do no better in substance. It will just be a change in style. What we are witnessing with the ruling Conservative party is not a party problem. Because the issues they are faced with are not personal to Johnson; trying to personalise the crisis to Johnson—whose character was already a matter of long-standing public discourse well before he became prime minister—or even to his party, is actually very disingenuous. First, because, as I have said, they needed such a person to deliver the fullness of Brexit. Secondly, because this crisis is not a problem of his party alone; they are problems of the entire British political system as it stands (any of the major parties, if in power, would have been split by Brexit) and of the economic arrangements on which it stands and is expected to manage.

In short, what Britain is faced with is a Great Unravelling, with political, social, economic, constitutional crises coming at once. Key questions, such as the rising cost of living, Brexit’s disruption of travel and commerce with the European landmass, and a looming break-up of the kingdom by those countries within it that wished to remain in the European Union but were outvoted by the much larger, specifically English, ethnic population, are all now beyond the ability of “normal” politics to resolve.

All this is because the problem really began between the 1940s and the 1960s, when the formal British Empire began to dissolve but the UK’s rulers failed to wean themselves and their populations off the standards of living they had derived from it, even as that wealth diminished. This broke the social democratic compact, which is what Thatcherism was about: the pie to be shared out had become smaller, so if it was to come down to a choice between enabling the continuance of private profit-making from overseas or creating a more egalitarian state at home, then the needs of the masses would have to be dumped from public policy budgets.

You see, “politics” is about the management of the economically-created social dynamics of society. When there is no economics to manage (or it has gone beyond the possibilities of management), then there can be no sensible politics. It becomes un-anchored.

What Britain is faced with is a Great Unravelling, with political, social, economic, constitutional crises coming at once.

The United Kingdom economic crisis is real, is severe, and cannot be fixed within their preferred frame of thinking. And, by keeping this current course, it is also going to be terminal.

Clearly, the only way out of this is to discuss the redistribution pattern of existing wealth created by the UK, but the epic stubbornness of the English ruling class will ensure that this does not happen; they will doggedly soldier on regardless of the damage they may cause to their own society, other societies, and the global natural environment.

The extent to, and ruthlessness with which, the Jeremy Corbyn faction and agenda were discredited and suppressed by the state and corporate media, and even by the Labour Party’s internal administration itself, shows how determined those who really run Britain are to maintain this direction against all odds.

Keir Starmer, the establishment journeyman politician installed into the Labour Party leadership from where he has hounded the Corbynites, may follow. He was nothing more than a blocker; a place-holder. Unless (or perhaps even if) Corbynite ideas persist among the masses in an organised way, he is also no longer needed.

So, it is a crisis specifically of England, the ground-zero of the British Empire project, and of England’s Englishness.

The only way to get out of this, would be for them to stop being the English invented by the empire and rediscover how to simply be a people.

This is the fourth in a series of articles that will review and comment on surveys related to the August 2022 general election, providing analytical tools to enable the reader to assess their credibility and potential impact.

With less than one month until the general election it was to be expected that at least one further round of national polls would have been conducted/released since my previous (and third) piece for The Elephant, leaving me with two more pieces to offer: one before and one after August 9. The five main developments and issues that are covered here are: a summary/comparison of the results of the three surveys relating to the presidential contest; consideration of respondents claiming to be “undecided” about their presidential voting intentions; some challenges in weighing the impact of deputy presidential running mates as well as of “the gender factor”; issues related to the interpretation of county-level data and media performance in this regard; a comparison of the sub-national regions/zones now used by the three mainstream pollsters, as well as the implication of such areal categories for consideration of the “Elephant in the room”: the ethnic factor in Kenya’s electoral politics.

Each of the three “mainstream pollsters” that this series has been tracking – TIFA Research, Infotrak and Radio Africa – released results during the week of 10 July. Though TIFA had conducted its survey during the last week of June, it delayed release of its data to give a client, the Standard newspaper, enough time to publish findings from the issue-based questions that it had loaded onto the questionnaire.  These questions constituted about one-third of the survey’s total content, thus in declaring “the sponsor” of the poll as required by the Publication of Electoral Polls Act of 2012, TIFA was not obliged to identify The Standard Group, although the Standard’s own article reporting and analysing the findings clearly stated that it had engaged TIFA for the purpose.

As the table below shows, the main change since the previous round of surveys is the emergence of a third candidate – George Wajackoyah – whose initial ratings suggest the profound impact he could have on the “two-horse” race by denying both of them the required “50 per cent + 1” to avoid a second round run-off contest.

Before offering a few points about the figures – and without casting any personal aspersions on Wajackoyah – the various and non-mutually exclusive possible motivations for such “minor candidate” ballot appearances for all elective positions in Kenya, and in no particular ranking order of importance or actual occurrence, may be suggested: to build one’s public profile for a possible future run or for shorter term business or professional benefits, or even just for social purposes, or with the aim of obtaining an appointed position by the eventual winner or winning political party (at either the county or national level); to draw votes away from one or more of the leading candidates, whether self-motivated or instigated/supported by others; and to promote a particular policy agenda, whether individual or on behalf of some issue-based party or lobby group (e. g., environmental protection).

Clearly, in a contest such as Kenya’s presidential one where a second round, run-off, contest must be held if no candidate initially garners enough votes spread out over enough of the counties to achieve a win, the bargaining power of any candidate who can take “credit” for this outcome, increases significantly. (Although an alternative outcome is for any such candidate(s) to be “enticed” to stand down – at least through a public declaration if it is too late to have any names removed from the ballot paper – for whatever motivation or benefit.)

* The TIFA survey sample was 1,533, but after removing those who declared that they are not registered voters, as well as those who said that they were but would “definitely not vote” on August 9, the sample decreased to this figure.

** Information on the sample size, the (correct) margin of error(not +/-0.8 per cent as reported by the Star), and the mode of data collection (not indicated by the Star, and not by SMS “invite” as in Radio Africa’s three previous surveys but by “ordinary” CATI) and dates (not 7-11 July as reported by the Star) was obtained from a senior Radio Africa editor, but who also (incorrectly) stated that the margin of error is +/-1 per cent). Radio Africa also announced (in the Star) that they will be conducting “weekly polls” between now and the election.

A few comments about these three polls should be added.  First, looking at the error margins of the TIFA and Infotrak results provides a useful lesson about random national surveys: that even massively increasing sample size (with the accompanying cost) adds little value in terms of the (national only) results. Specifically, even with a sample size of nearly nine times that of TIFA’s, Infotrak’s results fall within the margins of error of the two surveys (as shown, +/-2.7 per cent for TIFA’s and only +/- 1 per cent for Infotrak – and this is so even if there was a full week (and more) difference in the data collection dates).

Another point is that even if all three surveys were conducted by CATI, the Radio Africa poll once again reports a far lower proportion failing to answer the “which presidential candidate will you vote for” question. Why this survey has no figure for “no response” is puzzling; so, too, is Radio Africa’s reversion to a CATI methodology given that its last several surveys have been based on SMS “participation invitations”; the accompanying story offered no explanation for this.  It seems improbable that this contrast (i.e., only 3 per cent “undecided” vs. 10 per cent in TIFA’s and 16 per cent in Infotrak’s) is a consequence of Radio Africa’s slightly later data collection date, although this absence of a “No Response” figure explains Radio Africa’s significantly higher figures for both of the main candidates. (I have sought an explanation from Radio Africa about this – for example, do their interviewers put any “pressure” on their respondents to “just name the candidate you think you might vote for”?  I await a reply. In this regard, it is also unclear why the Daily Nation writers of the story on the Infotrak survey, in noting TIFA’s “delay” in releasing their results (on 12 July) suggested that this “could make the [TIFA] numbers obsolete in a fluid political situation”, yet – as noted above – they are statistically identical with those of Infotrak.

If Wajackoyah can maintain the level of his current popularity, he has the potential of forcing a run-off.

Whatever the case, the overall conclusions from these three recent surveys are first, that while Odinga maintains his lead over Ruto, he has not increased it over the last month – if anything, it has decreased slightly – and second, that if Wajackoyah can maintain his current level of popularity, he has the potential of forcing a run-off. This is evident if all those respondents who stated that they were as yet “undecided”, together with those who declined to answer this question at all (for whom, as noted, Radio Africa reported no figure), are removed from the calculation. Nevertheless, this reality exists even if the figures from one firm (Infotrak) put Odinga barely over the required “50 per cent + 1” threshold.  (Interpreting these same figures, James Mbaka of the Star is thus in error when, after recently reporting the results shown in the above table, he asserted that “Three recent opinion polls by credible firms projected that neither Raila nor Ruto would manage to win . . . in the First Round. . .” since he evidently failed to do this adjusted arithmetic. (Whether the Treasury can afford a run-off contest is another matter.)

One example of the failure to do such basic re-calculations was provided by Brian Otieno of the Standard in suggesting that “Ruto . . . would need the entire undecided vote to swing in his favour and also some two per cent from his opponent’s – Raila or George Wajackoyah, at four per cent baskets.”  Again, he failed to do the required (and quite simple) calculation.

Regardless of the likelihood of a runoff, such ratings for Wajackoyah raise the question as to just who his would-be voters are. As shown by TIFA in its media Release (of 11 July), they are most numerous (in proportionate terms) in the South Rift (8 per cent), Lower Eastern (7 per cent) and Mt. Kenya (6 per cent).

Further, and perhaps more significant, among probable voters, more than three times of those declaring an intention to vote for him are among the youngest age cohort (i.e., 18-24) as among the oldest (above 35): 7 per cent vs. 2 per cent. And recall here that such voting-intention questions were asked only to those who claimed to be registered voters, excluding those who said that they “definitely” would not vote.

More generally, and just on the basis of speculation, four (again, non-mutually exclusive) motives may constitute the basis of the support for Wajackoyah that these surveys have captured. At least among those who, on the basis of such polls (or other information), realize that he has absolutely no chance of winning, it could be an unhappy “protest” vote against the main ballot-choice of Ruto and Odinga (for whatever reasons), the “fun” of voting for an extremely “non-conformist” candidate based on whatever combination of his character and advertised policies (e.g., the legalization/promotion of the growing and marketing of marijuana, the execution of those convicted of corruption, etc.), the hope that his vote total will force a run-off contest in which he may be able to “sell” his overt support in exchange for some personal or policy presence in the next government, and/or the hope that he will be encouraged to participate in some future election (for whatever position) with a better chance of winning.

Regardless of the likelihood of a runoff, such ratings for Wajackoyah raise the question as to just who his would-be voters are.

At the same time, it is possible that such figures will not be reflected in the official results after the votes are counted, based on the fact that such survey responses were either not sincere when they were given, or that at least a significant proportion of such people will decide that votes cast for him will be ‘wasted’, and therefore force themselves to choose between the two viable candidates on August 9, especially if the polls continue to show the Odinga-Ruto race as ‘too close to call’.  Time (and further survey research) will tell.

Again, based on these survey figures, we have seen, as expected, that the proportion of all respondents who were unable or declined to mention a preferred presidential candidate has continued to decrease since the beginning of the year. For example, according to TIFA, it has dropped by about half, from 30 per cent in January to just 14 per cent in late June. At the same time, it cannot be assumed that all such respondents have not, in fact, made up their minds, but may be too shy to reveal their voting intentions, for one reason or another. Indeed, only with the benefit of credible official results will it be known if at least some of those declining to reveal their voting intentions have actually concealed them – similar to the significant proportions of respondents in the surveys that were “wrong” with regard to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US election and in the UK’s “Brexit” vote the same year. Assuming that is the case, who between Ruto and Odinga will benefit most when the real votes are counted?

While an answer to this question must wait a bit longer, it is clear that the proportion of respondents who have declined to name a preferred presidential candidate in this electoral season remains larger than it was in the period leading up to any of the last three elections. The relevant figures taken from surveys conducted about one month before them are as follows: in 2007, 1 per cent; in 2013, 5 per cent; and in 2017, 9 per cent. It should also be noted that the surveys which yielded these figures were all conducted face-to-face at respondents’ households, in contrast to the three at issue here. It may be assumed that in the former setting, where interviewers and respondents are able to establish a more “personal” relationship, it would be more “awkward” for a respondent to avoid answering this question.

Aside from any differential impact of methodology, however, it may also be suggested that the choice of the main presidential candidates in this election is rather more complex or challenging than in any previous (multi-party) contest, in that the leading contenders have largely exchanged their political “clothing”. For his part, the deputy president is largely campaigning against his president – and thus the status quo – even if throughout their first term, there appeared to be not an iota of daylight between them. By contrast, the former prime minister finds (or has put) himself in the somewhat awkward position of trying to sit in two chairs at the same time: competing with the DP in offering credible “change” improvement for the vast majority of the electorate currently suffering a plethora of economic (among other) woes, while largely unable to attack the outgoing president to whom he owes whatever advantage the latter’s support provides. Indeed, in a TIFA survey of June 2021, fifty per cent more respondents identified Ruto rather than Odinga as “the political leader most active in terms of criticizing the Jubilee government and trying to hold it to account”, and in TIFA’s April 2022 survey, some three-quarters of respondents identified Odinga as “Uhuru’s preferred successor”.  Such a situation makes it largely impossible for Odinga to assume the anti-government posture he has assumed in the last five elections, notwithstanding his short-lived absorption into Moi’s KANU government and party in 2001.

The proportion of all respondents who were unable (or declined) to mention a preferred presidential candidate has continued to decrease since the beginning of the year

Whatever reasons might be offered about such higher figures, the question remains as to just who these “undecideds” are (as well as those who simply declined to answer the question – coded as “No Response”).  A cursory look at the data offers some indication. First, dividing all respondents who claimed to be registered voters into those who did vs. those who did not name any candidate, rather more of the former answered the question about their likelihood of voting by saying they “will definitely vote” (71 per cent vs. 63 percent), suggesting a somewhat greater interest among them in the election altogether. An even greater contrast is found in terms of gender, with almost three times as many women as men not naming a preferred candidate (21 per cent vs. 8 per cent). Again, whether this is due to shyness, a lower level of interest in elections, or taking longer to make this ballot choice, perhaps due to Kenya’s largely patriarchal culture in which women receive “instructions” various issues from husbands, fathers, etc., cannot be discerned. Such a contrast is nearly equally apparent in terms of education levels, as significantly fewer of those without any or just a primary education named any candidate as compared with those with secondary or higher education. Further, in ethnic terms, while at least nine out of ten Luo and Kalenjin named a candidate, the figures for nearly all other (major) groups is about 10 per cent lower, aside from those in the Mt. Kenya grouping, who are in an intermediate position, evidently based on the presence of a fellow ethnic running mate candidate on both sides of the main partisan divide.

On the other hand, no contrasts in the proportions of those who did vs. those who did not name a candidate are found in terms of political party/coalition alignment, age, and employment status. (Actually determining the relevant salience of each factor would require a complicated regression analysis that goes beyond the confines of this piece!)

In sum, it seems clear that the most frequent response of the “undecideds” in TIFA’s April survey as to what would most enable them to decide whom to vote for – “more information about policies/manifestos” – is not the whole story.

Precisely measuring the impact of running mates on campaigns is always a challenging task, in large part because many respondents may be unclear about this in their own minds, or unwilling to acknowledge it even if they are. When the respective supporters of the two main presidential candidates were asked a more general question in TIFA’s last survey, “How satisfied are you with Raila’s/Ruto’s choice of Martha Karua/Rigathi Gachagua as his deputy president running-mate? Are you…?”, there was a marked contrast in their responses, with considerably more of Odinga’s than Ruto’s supporters stating that they were “very satisfied” (90 per cent vs. 67 per cent), yet Ruto’s overall support rating rose slightly more than Odinga’s (4 per cent vs. 3 per cent compared to the previous survey, although this 1 per cent difference is within the survey’s margin of error).

(One other point: When the Standard reported these results – based on several questions they had sponsored in TIFA’s June survey, as noted above – the story’s caption was: “Poll: Karua will net more votes for Raila than Rigathi for Ruto”, yet as Nzau Musau explained in his first sentence, this conclusion was derived from a perception question, not an analysis of the actual candidates’ ratings/change of fortunes since TIFA’s previous survey. That is, whereas 49 per cent stated that Karua will add to Raila’s vote total, only 30 per cent felt likewise about Ruto’s choice of Gachagua, with another 21 per cent not certain as to which running-mate will bring along most votes.)

In ethnic terms, while at least nine out of ten Luo and Kalenjin named a candidate, the figures for all other (major) groups are about 10 per cent lower.

Moreover, with specific regard to the Karua/gender factor – and again, notwithstanding the perception that she is considerably more useful in terms of adding votes to Odinga than Gachagua is to Ruto – the rise in their respective ratings is (as noted) statistically identical.  Further, Odinga suffers from a significantly greater “gender gap” (i.e., male vs. female) than does Ruto (47-37 per cent for the former but only 40-38 percent for the latter). Indeed, this 10 per cent gap for Odinga is exactly what it was at the end of April (37-27 per cent) before running mates were announced.  At the same, it may be the case that her presence on the Azimio ticket will encourage higher voter turnout among women on August 9 (whether to vote for her and Odinga, or across the board), but the main point is that whatever Karua is contributing to Odinga’s electoral prospects, there does not appear to be any “gender” advantage – so far, at least.

Reporting the latest Infotrak poll, Daily Nation writers Collins Omulo and Onyango K’Onyango began by referring to “ten crucial counties with a total of 3.6 million votes” that “recent opinion polls have classified as battlegrounds, where the vote could go either way.”

It should first be noted that only Infotrak (once again) used this term in releasing its results, without, however,  giving it any numerical definition. (In June the number of respondents from each county was reported, but not for July; since the sample size in both surveys was identical, it can be assumed that the county numbers are the same.) For example, these writers stated that: “However, Mombasa with 641,913 voters and Tana River with 143,096 voters are now battlegrounds with Mr Odinga’s popularity in Mombasa at 46 per cent, Dr Ruto at 27 per cent and 20 per cent being undecided voters.” In other words, in Mombasa Odinga enjoys a 19 per cent margin. Yet with some 270 respondents drawn from this county, the margin of error is +/-6 per cent, equal to a 12 per cent spread – giving Odinga a clear lead of (at least) 7 per cent. So how much larger would Odinga’s lead have to be for Infotrak to classify Mombasa as among his “strongholds”?  We have no idea.

In any case, such a statement is misleading in three senses. First, since Kenya does not have a US-type electoral college system, counties are not electoral units that are “won” or “lost”; the only thing that matters is how the votes are distributed between the candidates across the entire country in their efforts to attain the “50 per cent + 1” threshold.  (This statement assumes that neither of the two main candidates will have any difficulty in obtaining at least 25 per cent of the vote in at least 24 of the 47 counties – which all recent polls suggest is certain to be the case.)  In the Kenyan context, therefore, “winning” a sparsely populated county (in terms of registered voters who actually turn out to vote on election day) such as Lamu or Marsabit by netting a few more votes than one’s main opponent is not nearly as critical as “losing” a highly populated county such as Nairobi or Nakuru by simply increasing one’s share of the vote there by a few per cent.

Second, and more egregiously (as suggested above), the Daily Nation’s writers fail to interrogate the statistical basis of Infotrak’s lists of counties in the “grip” of either Odinga or Ruto: 21 in that of the former and 16 in that of the latter. Specifically, there is no reference to any definition of this term; presumably, some stated margin between the two candidates’ ratings in each county.  To repeat the point from my previous Elephant piece, before accepting Infotrak’s “stronghold” lists, it is necessary to calculate the margin of error for each of these counties. For example, Garissa, with a Ruto-Odinga gap of 22 per cent (based on figures of 50 per cent vs. 28, respectively), is included among Ruto’s “strongholds”.  Yet with a registered voter population of about 165,000 and an allocated sample of about 85, the resultant margin of error is +/-11 per cent, equal to a 22 per cent spread – exactly the difference between them. Should that earn Garissa the “stronghold” label in the Ruto list?

In other words, while a national sample of 9,000 looks impressive, when divided (proportionally) into 47 counties, the resultant margins of error require attention.

This Nation piece further reports the Infotrak CEO as stating that: “We have seen a complete flip in Lamu and Kwale”, referring to an increase for Odinga from June to July of 26 per cent in the former county and of 19 per cent in the latter. Yet the margins of error for these counties are +/-17 per cent in the former (for a 34 per cent spread) and nearly +/-8.5 per cent in the latter (for a 17 per cent spread), meaning that the change in the figure for Lamu falls within this county’s margin of error and that of the latter only just outside its margin of error (i.e., 2 per cent), perhaps not qualifying for the description of “a complete flip”.

While it does not employ any vote-support categories (such as “battlegrounds”), TIFA likewise could be more explicit about the error margins of the nine zones for which it provides sub-national results. The most extreme case is that of South Rift (which, as shown, is comprised of just two counties: Kajiado and Narok (see below). Constituting only 5 per cent of TIFA’s total sample (in this most recent survey of 1,533 – but as shown, only 1,442, having removed those who stated that they are not registered voters, and then leaving only 1,308, having also removed those who state that they “will definitely not vote”), this amounts to only (“likely to vote”) 65 respondents. Based on a total registered voter population of about 1,270,000, the margin of error is +/-12 per cent, equal to a 24 per cent spread. Keeping this in mind, neither the increase for Odinga-Karua by 17 per cent, nor even the decrease for Ruto-Gachagua by 33 per cent looks quite so dramatic (since the former’s gain could really be just 5 per cent, although the latter’s loss remains a hefty 21 per cent).

Similarly (in the same Nation article), Infotrak reports that over the last month, Ruto’s popularity (i.e., the expressed intention to vote for him) “jumped” from 52 per cent to 55 per cent in Mt Kenya while “Mr Odinga’s approval [sic] currently stands at 24 per cent from 27 per cent in June.”  In other words, even if Odinga gained so much in the (sparsely populated) South Rift so as to overtake Ruto by 10 per cent there, the 3 per cent gain in Mt. Kenya, combined with Odinga’s decline of the same amount, gives the DP a far more (potential) vote boost, given the vastly greater population of registered voters in the latter zone.

Since Kenya does not have a US-type electoral college system, counties are not electoral units that are “won” or “lost”.

As for Radio Africa, the report of their most recent survey offered correlations of preferred presidential candidate with (reported, presumably monthly) income. In doing so, the second category shown (after “no income”) is Shs1-30,000/-, which surely must include at least half of the sample. Yet they then use five additional more affluent categories, the highest being “above Shs150,000/-“ which, based on data from the last few years of TIFA surveys, could not have included more than a handful of respondents, if that. For example, in TIFA’s most recent poll, only 4 per cent of respondents reported earning more than Shs50,000/- per month, yet Radio Africa presents results for four high income categories beginning with Shs50,000/- to Shs70,000.  Based on a sample of 3,000, that would be equivalent to about 120 respondents, for whom the margin of error (if all those with reported monthly earnings above Shs50,000/- were lumped together) is +/- 9 per cent – equal to an 18 per cent spread. In other words, even if Radio Africa did not display the margin of error for each income category, they should have shared the number of respondents in each one with their readers and let them judge what, if any, statistical integrity such correlations have.

Perhaps the overall point is that even if there is no agreed minimum number of respondents among even ‘credible’ survey firms for which such sub-total results should be presented, whether such categories are income, regions, or any other variable, there should be more transparency about such sub-national error-margins.

Radio Africa has now jumped on the TIFA “bandwagon” by adjusting its previous sub-national categories as Infotrak began to do, starting with its most recent previous survey (although they did not include a chart for these as they have done in the past; TIFA always includes a list of its nine zones, listing the counties in each one). All three firms have thus now moved away from using the eight pre-2010 provinces for this purpose. The table below shows the sub-national units each one used in releasing their most recent survey data reported above.

*These regions/zones were provinces in the pre-2010 Constitution era.

**TIFA includes only Kajiado and Narok in this zone while for Infotrak it also includes Kericho and Bomet. While this makes geographic sense, TIFA prefers to place all the main Kalenjin areas in Central Rift.

Although, as shown, the regions (or in TIFA’s terminology, “zones”) differ slightly across the three firms, they nevertheless allow for some comparisons at this sub-national level, even if none of them includes the margin of error for each one, an omission which helps to explain a certain amount of erroneous interpretation by journalists in asserting that one candidate or another has “gained” or “lost” votes in a particular region when the change actually falls within that region’s margin of error, which is by necessity much greater than for the national sample as a whole, as also discussed above.  At least Infotrak and TIFA always show the percentage of the total sample that was drawn from each region/zone, so that, knowing the total sample size, it is possible to take a margin of error table and a calculator and do the “math” to ascertain these.

Presenting survey results at this sub-national level raises a question rarely asked by local journalists (or others), even if it seems that many are thinking about: To what extent can these units be considered as “substitutes” for at least the main ethnic group resident within each one?

This question arises simply because no survey firm releases results with ethnic correlations, for the (perhaps obvious) reason that none of them (nor any media house) would want to be accused of “dividing Kenyans”, let alone “threatening national unity”, even when – as is certainly the case in this pre-election season – the data reality shows that Kenyans are much less polarized along ethnic lines than many assume. (Let me also note here that several attempts over recent years to obtain public policy “guidance” on this issue from the National Cohesion and Integration Commission yielded no “edible” fruit, notwithstanding the apparent interest they displayed in the figures that were shared with them.)

For example, it was found (in a June 2021 TIFA survey) that only 40 per cent of Kenyans answered the question, “Is there anyone who you consider to be the main leader of your ethnic community?” in the affirmative.  True, this national figure rose as this year’s election approached (in TIFA’s June 2022 survey) to 54 per cent – clear evidence that like the proverbial “hangman’s noose”, elections tend to concentrate communal minds, but this seems far below what most people consider to be the case. And this defiance of “common knowledge” holds true even if the specific figures are as high as two-thirds among the Luo, Kalenjin and Kamba and below 50 per cent for the Kikuyu and Gusii. Also significantly, among those who believe their community has such a leader, there is far from unanimity as to who that leader is, even for the two communities with “serious” presidential candidates: the Luo and the Kalenjin. (The lower figures for the Kikuyu and Gusii are clearly in part a reflection of the fact that neither has a serious presidential candidate in this election, while the former has two deputy presidential candidates and a president about to retire.)

While thoughtful people may reasonably disagree about what the impact of releasing such figures would be, given such widespread assumptions about their salience in electoral choices, it is clear that much analytical capacity – and thus public understanding – is lost by “hiding” them (even when it is clear that the major campaign teams make considerable use of such data in crafting and implementing their vote-hunting and turnout strategies).

In the absence of such ethnic correlations in publicly released findings, the public is left with the regional correlations that the main survey firms almost always include.

The following table (based on TIFA’s June survey data) shows the largest (and where included, also the second largest) ethnic group in each region.

It is clear, therefore, that while one or another ethnic group predominates in most of these zones, there remains considerable heterogeneity in most of them.

Given the reality (described above) that not a single ethnic group is homogenous in terms of its presidential voting intentions, the question arises as to what accounts for these intra-ethnic divisions. For example, within a (largely) ethnically homogenous area such as Mukurwe-ini in Nyeri or Kilungu in Makueni, what factors explain why some people will vote for Ruto and others for Odinga? At this stage, what should be clear is that even beginning to answer this question requires not assumed generalizations but detailed research, and of a nature that would best include and also go beyond quantitative surveys.

Another issue not considered here is the so-called “bandwagon” effect: that candidates or parties shown to be leading in polls will thereby attract more votes, based on the assumption that many people want to be on “the winning side”.  For now, it is enough to say that it is widely assumed to exist, and at a significant level. If not, why would we see candidates and other partisans so vociferously bashing results that do not show them leading, as well as sponsoring “fake” polls – sometimes by “unknown” survey firms, and at other times attributing results to credible firms that had nothing to do with them. The non-profit research organization, Code for Africa, recently reported that it has been identifying six to seven “fake” polls per week over the recent past – which they define as attributing survey results to firms that did not conduct them. What is clear is that candidates find it difficult to remain silent when a credible survey firm shows them trailing, or even just decreasing in popularity. Just how the impact of such “fake” – as well as genuine – polls might be measured will be taken up in my next piece.

In the meantime, with less than three weeks remaining before the 5-day embargo period prescribed in the Publication of Electoral Polls Act kicks in, and with all the mainstream pollsters either having begun or about to launch their final (or nearly final) round of surveys, there is certain to be plenty more material to present and discuss before “D-Day” on August 9.

Institutions, including universities, have internal and external lives that are mutually constitutive. Institutional cultures reflect and reproduce prevailing and intertwined national and global contexts, challenges, and opportunities. USIU-Africa’s institutional culture exhibited the complexities and contradictions of its history, location, and aspirations.

There is a peculiar, if predictable, malaise that afflicts many African postcolonial societies and the mindsets of institutions and individuals: an unsettling sensation of being less than, combined with a desperate yearning to become like them—the former colonial masters—that generates perpetual mimicry and underperformance. This is what underscores the imperatives of existential, epistemic, and economic decolonization.

I commented in an earlier reflection on USIU-Africa’s duality, as a Kenyan and an American university, which is as seductive as it is debilitating, a source of both innovation and inertia. It engenders a perpetual search for a cohesive identity, a precarious institutional culture characterized by uneven expectations, the warring demands of Africanness and Americanness, in which their respective perils, rather than their possibilities, tend to be accentuated.

I frequently encountered and countered the proverbial “African time” by participants and invited speakers turning up late at campus meetings and events, and students complaining about lecturers who came late to class or not at all. I was often surprised by the poor quality of annual reports from some departments and divisions, and delays in the work of several institutional committees and projects. The University Council didn’t acquit itself well either: its committee meetings were often cancelled due to lack of quorum, and in many meetings, it was clear to management that some members had not read the reports we painstakingly prepared.

I repeatedly made it known that I valued timeliness, rigorous standards, robust deliberations, and adherence to high expectations, ethical behavior, and exceptional performance. It was gratifying to see some met the demands of institutional excellence, but many others did not. As is often the case, the laggards were the loudest complainants, who sought to fuel a culture of intolerance, incivility, and illiberalism that reflected the dysfunctions of the larger national polity.

At stake was a battle against the culture of mediocrity evident in all manner of spaces and organizations. The brilliant, young Kenyan journalist, Larry Madowo, incisively captured the culture of low expectations in an article in The Daily Nation of November 15, 2016, titled “Why do Kenyans accept such low standards in everything?” He called it “the at least mindset.”  It is worth quoting at some length.

“This ‘at least’ mindset Kenyans have is just an apology for low standards…. When we are surprised that anything begins on time, we unconsciously allow the organizers of future events to be tardy because we’ve already made it acceptable. We are not outraged when a notorious politician does objectively horrible things because “at least” he cares for the people.

We make excuses for bad behavior because “at least” they haven’t killed anyone. We make excuses for grand corruption even in the face of incontrovertible evidence because the other side is just as bad…

When you criticize anything in Kenya, there is never a shortage of people who will tell you to be positive and stop being so pessimistic. The argument is always that “at least” something is being done.

We accept bare minimums when we are entitled to so much more. Optimism cannot, and should, not be a substitute for a solid critique… You can’t build a merit-based society if any effort demands to be applauded, however little. We scrape the bottom of the barrel so many times, come up with almost nothing and are still pleased that ‘at least’ it’s not entirely empty.”

The following year, in his commencement address at USIU-Africa, the Chief Executive Officer of the Commission for University Education (CUE), Dr. Mwenda Ntarangwi, quoted Madowo’s article above. He implored the graduating students to eschew the “at least mindset.” “Does patriotism mean accepting low standards?” he asked. “Should it not be the other way round, that patriotism means we love this nation so much that we accept nothing but the best from it and that we also give it the best? As you leave here today let me ask you to please change this culture of ‘at least’ and model and expect excellence in all that you do.”

I was troubled by the culture of authoritarianism and discretionary decision making I found, in which the vice chancellor made all decisions even on petty matters. I commented in previous reflections on the debilitating cultures of xenophobia, sexism, and unethical research practices.

The biggest elephant in the room was ethnic chauvinism, dubbed “tribalism”, a colonial construct that reduces Africans to members of atavistic “tribes.” It is a sad commentary on the endurance of colonial civilizational conceits that many in Kenya and elsewhere on the continent uncritically embrace the term “tribe” for their ethnic groups or nations. I told my students not to use it in my classes for its racist origins and offensiveness to describe African identities that elsewhere are dignified by terms such as ethnicity or nationality and are not mutilated by suffix “tribe” after the name. Who would describe an Englishman or Englishwoman a member of the English tribe?

There is a large literature on the colonial invention of “traditions” and “tribes” that many contemporary Africans swear by to invoke some imaginary precolonial cultural authenticity. A distinction is often made between moral ethnicity (ethnicity as a sociocultural identity) and political ethnicity (ethnicity as a political ideology). As an identity ethnicity is not the problem, it acquires its disruptive poison through political mobilization in contestations for power and privileges.

Such is the pervasive and perverse conceit in constructions of cultural and political hierarchies that the marshaling of ethnic identities in national and institutional life is seen as an African pathology. Yet, in the United States and other multicultural societies in the global North ethnicity is substituted by race. As the Trump presidency made it abundantly clear to those who had drank the kool-aid about American democracy, white supremacy is alive and well. Racist politicians routinely mobilize racial difference for the lethal concoction of discrimination, inequality, and disenfranchisement for racialized minorities. As the latter grow, political revanchism escalates, as evident in Trump’s and post-Trump America.

In an online essay posted in late December 2007, written during Kenya’s descent into the abyss of post-election violence, titled “Holding a nation hostage to a bankrupt political class,” I commented on the destructiveness of the country’s politicization of ethnicity. So, I was not surprised by the distractive and disruptive power of ethnicism when I was vice chancellor at USIU-Africa.

As is the case at the national level, the politics of ethnicity at the university reared its ugly head over appointments, promotion, and representation. The higher the position the more fraught the internal contestations and grandstanding. One of the most contentious was for the appointment of an acting Deputy Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs. Two substantive appointments had turned down the offer.

A cabal from one ethnic group held secret meetings to push the candidacy of one of their own, who had applied but was rejected by the search committee that included members of the faculty, staff, student, and university councils, as well as some members of management and the deans’ committee. An influential member of the University Council pushed for his own favorite candidate who was not qualified for the position.

Fortunately, the appointment of the DVC and other members of management was my prerogative as vice chancellor based on recommendations from the search committees. I used the appointment of the vice chancellor as a template in which as candidates we went through various stages concluded by on campus meetings with several groups of the university community. This search was novel in Kenya but common in the United States where I relocated from.

Management and I instituted a transparent process of appointments and promotions for senior administrative and academic positions. As I noted in an earlier reflection, each academic department and school formed an appointment and promotion committee. For heads of key administrative departments, management interviewed the candidates as well.

In 2018-2019, we embarked on a staff redeployment exercise in which about three dozen people were transferred to other departments. Human resource experts recommend such periodic redeployments as an effective tool of talent retention and management. It helps re-energize employees by offering them an opportunity to learn new skills and even assume higher positions and saves employers the high costs of redundancies and recruitment of new employees.

In our case, through the Tuition Waiver Program many employees had earned bachelor’s or master’s degrees ill-suited for the positions they occupied. Management was also keen to break the ethnic enclaves that had emerged over the years in various administrative divisions and departments that were often dominated by members from one or a couple of ethnic groups.

This was initially met with some resistance, but many of the individuals involved increasingly expressed satisfaction with their redeployment. We manage to loosen the stranglehold of ethnic cabals, but they were by no means broken. The ethnic chauvinists looked for every opportunity to attack members of management. Revealingly, they focused their ire on the highly accomplished and effective women in management who were in their early 40s. In my case, this was overlaid by xenophobia, which underscores the fact that layers of bigotry cascade and overlap.

Despite popular mythology, universities have never been ivory towers splendidly isolated from their societies and the wider world. Their values, missions, and institutional cultures reflect their times and locations. The few colonial universities that were established in Africa sought to reproduce the colonial order, while the explosion of universities after independence reflected the expansive dreams of development. Similarly, in the United States it is now widely acknowledged that many of the country’s most prestigious universities were built with enslaved labor, or benefitted from the proceeds of slavery, and laid the intellectual and ideological foundations of American racism.

Prior to my time as vice chancellor, I had written extensively on the entangled, complex, and conflicted relationship between African universities and various external stakeholders. The honeymoon of the early post-independence years wilted as the drive for Africanization or indigenization of the public service was achieved, and as the unforgiving conditionalities of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed with fundamentalist zeal by the international financial institutions wrecked African economies and tore asunder the independence social contract.

At a conference of African vice chancellors in 1986, the World Bank baldly declared the continent didn’t need universities; some architects of the Washington Consensus had discovered social rates of return were higher for primary than higher education, voilà! Beleaguered African states facing mounting struggles for the “second independence” arising out of the collapse of the nationalist promises of development and democracy, often led by workers, the youth and university students, were only too happy to dismantle universities as viable spaces of critical knowledge production. So, began the slide towards underfunding at the same time as the number of universities expanded to meet rising demand.

By the time I joined USIU-Africa in January 2016, the hand of the state over the higher education sector had loosened considerably. The president of the republic was no longer chancellor of all the public universities. Regulatory authority rested on an increasingly professional agency, CUE. Private universities were allowed to operate, although doubts about their quality lingered in the public mind and among their alumni as I observed. Moreover, as we experienced at USIU-Africa, the Kenyan regulator was more authoritarian than our American regulator, although that began to change under Dr. Mwenda’s leadership.

Institutional leaders on my campus including members of top governance organs had drunk deep in the autocratic well of the one party state, now overlaid by often misguided corporatist injunctions for profitability and efficiency. Above all, the levels of public funding per student continued to decline, which left many public universities virtually bankrupt when the pipeline of privately sponsored students dried up from 2017.

As I noted in an earlier reflection, the private sector and the rapidly growing class of high net worth individuals did not pick up the slack. Some of Africa’s wealthiest people gladly make generous contributions to exceedingly wealthy universities in the global North rather than those in their own countries. This is not surprising given the fact that these elites send their children to the global North. It’s a vote of no confidence in the academic worth of their local universities, where many of them received their education before the ravages of SAPs.

There’s a long tradition, crystallized in Frantz Fanon’s trenchant critique, The Wretched of the Earth, of depicting African elites as a comparator bourgeoisie, as the least patriotic among their global counterparts. In a paper titled “African Universities and the Production of Elites” delivered at a conference on African elites organized by the University of Toronto in January 2021, I argued for a more nuanced understanding and differentiation of African elites.

However, the fact remains they are the source of the huge illicit outflows of capital from the continent, estimated at $60 billion in 2016 by the UN Economic Commission for Africa High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa.“This is twice the amount of money flowing in as aid annually. Often, money leaving developing countries illicitly ends up right back in banks in Europe and the U.S.”

Our interest as management in engaging the private sector went beyond financial resources. I’ve long believed principled and mutually beneficial partnerships between universities and business are essential for two other reasons. First, in so far as research and development (R&D) is essential not only for national economic development, an area in which Africa performs abysmally (accounting for a mere 1.0% of global R&D), it is imperative for the growth and competitiveness of African business. The multinational corporations they compete with conduct the bulk of their R&D in their home countries often in collaboration with their research universities. How many African businesses conduct R&D, let alone in partnership with their local universities?

Second, universities are valued by society for their capacity to produce high quality human capital. Historically, business has invested in buying talent, rather than building talent. On their part, universities pride themselves as oases of advanced knowledges production and critical contemplation unsullied by the vocational preoccupations of lesser tertiary institutions. This incongruity in expectations has sometimes resulted in mismatches between university graduates and the needs of the economy and labor market.

In much of Africa, graduate unemployment and underemployment is higher than for those with lower levels of education. In East Africa, according to a story by Gilbert Nganga in University World News of June 2020, 2018, a study by the Inter-University Council of East Africa “shows that Uganda has the worst record, with at least 63% of graduates found to lack job market skills. It is followed closely by Tanzania, where 61% of graduates were ill prepared. In Burundi and Rwanda, 55% and 52% of graduates respectively were perceived to not be competent. In Kenya, 51% of graduates were believed to be unfit for jobs.”

In 2016, the British Council produced a report, Universities, Employability and Inclusive Development covering Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, which our management team found quite alarming as USIU-Africa was ranked lower than its competitors for the employability of its graduates. It prompted us to commission an internal study on the subject. The team consulted existing research and literature, gathered extensive data on the global, regional, and local contexts, carried out a survey of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and employers, and made several recommendations.

They found that employers expected technical, subject, and soft skills. Among the soft skills valued in the current job market, the following stood out: communication and interpersonal skills, problem solving skills, using own initiative and being self-motivated, working under pressure, organizational skills, teamwork, ability to learn, numeracy, valuing diversity and cultural differences, and negotiation skills. For the future, employers identified the skills that would become more critical included the following: literacies in various media, scientific literacy, ICT literacy, financial literacy, curiosity, persistence and grit, adaptability, service orientation, leadership, and social awareness.

Following the survey, the university enhanced its support systems for student employability preparedness. Existing programs for life and soft skills training were strengthened or new ones established. This included reforming general education, improving career training and job fairs, internships, and community service, and creating youth boot camps. The university also sought to infuse innovation and entrepreneurship in its academic curricula and extra-curricular activities by setting up an incubation and innovation center and introducing an assessment system for extra-curricular activities.

Also, we worked hard to enhance partnerships with the private sector, both international and local companies. We enjoyed modest success. Examples include the establishment of an apprenticeship and innovation program by a major local company, an AppFactory by Microsoft, the only one then in Kenya and 14th on the continent. We soon established a presence as an institution that was serious about employability that enabled us to attract the African Development Bank to select our university as one of four for a coding center of excellence and win a competitive bid by the World Bank to provide employability training for more than 30,000 young people in six counties.

As gratifying as these efforts were, it rankled that we failed to attract local companies to support research including those owned or run by members of our own board and council. Similarly, as I noted in a previous reflection, we were unable to crack the door to philanthropic giving from high net worth individuals locally.

Together with the Director of University Advancement and some members of his team we also put considerable efforts to forge partnerships with several embassies from the G20 countries and others that had sizable numbers of students at the university. We were able to secure funding from the US Embassy in Nairobi to establish a state of the art social media lab that produced highly regarded reports on the social media landscape in Kenya. Two of our most entrepreneurial faculty members got a multi-million dollar grant from USAID jointly with an American university for a project on youth employability and empowerment.

Management also put efforts in building external partnerships abroad. For example, the Director of University Advancement and I undertook a six week partnerships development and fundraising trip to the USA between April and May 2018. The trip presented an opportunity to promote the interests of the university to numerous constituencies including universities and research associations, foundations, our alumni, Kenyan and African diaspora communities, government agencies, private corporations, individuals, and potential friends. The visit covered 10 cities namely, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, New York City, Washington DC, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, and Detroit. Nearly 90 engagements took place.

We returned with four main takeaways that were summarized in a detailed report shared with the university’s academic and administrative leaders. First, we found a strong desire to engage with Africa in general, and African universities. Second, USIU-Africa enjoyed a strategic advantage because of its dual accreditation in Kenya and the USA. Third, we noted that all the universities we visited both big and small, research intensive and teaching oriented, were almost invariably better resourced than we were, and they seemed to have stronger cultures and systems of governance, management, and fundraising that provided us opportunities to reimagine our future. Finally, we were often urged by our interlocutors to actively engage American companies and organizations based in Kenya.

In the report we noted that to take full advantage of the partnership and fundraising opportunities we had cultivated it was imperative we needed to build our capacities, raise our visibility and value as a partner institution. First, we needed to strengthen the capacity of the Advancement division in terms of personnel, skills, and IT infrastructure.

Second, the establishment of an office of Global Affairs led by a senior academic with extensive private and public sector experience was essential to shepherd and oversee international academic partnerships. Third, in many of our conversations it became clear that we could position USIU-Africa as a research and policy hub in East Africa in collaboration with American institutions by establishing specialized institutes and centers that they could partner with and support.

Finally, it was necessary to review and strengthen our systems and processes to make them more effective for international engagements. Specifically, we needed to expand student accommodation to attract more foreign students. During the trip we repeatedly heard complaints about the slowness with which African institutions conduct business including responding to basic communication, negotiations and signing of MoUs, following up on agreements, and where necessary timely reporting on resource utilization.

We urged the divisions and the schools to work closely with University Advancement to pursue the various opportunities the trip had opened. Save for a few inter-institutional partnerships that were established, by the time the Covid-19 pandemic broke out there was little follow up.

Some would say there were “at least” some follow ups. In my book that was not good enough.

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