How vote-buying is now disguised as empowerment handouts

In a strange twist of fate, Friday’s edition of The Standard pre-empted my opening punchlines for today, to make it the news headline for the day, moments before I released the article to the editor. For those of things spiritual, they would say we were in the spirit.

However, from an analytical world, one would wonder why such a randomised coincidence? Does it speak of something deeper, like say a trend or a general mood across the country? How many more Kenyans out there were independently reflecting on this wave of change sweeping across Africa?

What is undeniable, however, is that a continent that has been synonymous with strong men having absolute control over political and State power is witnessing unprecedented events. The region has seen the rise of one-term presidents, the most unlikely candidates win the presidency, like in Senegal, and the crumpling of dominant political parties like in South Africa.

Historically, the Kenyan people have been pacesetters on matters of democracy, entrepreneurship and digital revolution from their endowment with robust human capital. It would be naïve for those who control State power today to imagine that their citizenry is not taking note of what is happening around the region.

This brings us to the central question of the day: will the handouts be dished out at State House and other places around the country in the name of empowerment programmes eventually translate into actual votes in August 2027?

For avoidance of doubt, majority of the attendees to these forums, and many of us waiting for our turn to collect our pint, understand it is all politics. Interestingly, there is a lot of evidence around this culture of political handouts in a bid to influence electoral outcomes in a democracy. Kenya features in many of these studies, implying the world is well versed with this version of our democracy.

Theoretically, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistant documents the role of money in both advancing or negating democracy, in a 2014 Handbook on Political Finance. From a practical perspective, political parties require adequate funding to run campaigns and share their ideologies with voters scattered across diverse geographic locations within a country.

On the contrary side, the role of money in politics is also deemed to be the greatest threat to democracy around the world today. These threats spread across continents to include huge corporate campaign donations in the United States, drug money flowing into politics in Latin America and corruption scandals throughout Asia and Europe.

In Africa, illicit flows into politics would be from all sources, including corruption, drugs, wash wash, gangs that control the region’s mineral endowments or outright withdrawals from state coffers given the weak governance institution in the continent.

According to IDEA, the problems of money in politics are financial scandals, abuse of public funds, drug cartels supplying illicit money to politicians and private corporations funneling vast sums of monies to political parties to buy loyalty. The secretive nature of campaign funding makes the system open for abuse by big businesses and organized crimes.

Narrowing down into the ongoing state-funded tokenism to buy loyalty and possibly forestall voter apathy against the Kenya Kwanza(KK) regime, it would be advisable for the administration’s strategist to carefully analyse the available evidence. On the brighter side for the regime sympathizers, Eric Kramon, in an article published by World Politics in May 2016, suggests vote buying is an effective tool, with origins from machine politics using Kenyan data.

According to Kramon, machine holds recipients of handouts accountable for their subsequent political behaviour. Thus, vote-buying is most prevalent where political party machine are not present or where parties exert little effort to monitor voters. According to the author, politicians in Kenya distribute electoral handouts to convey information to voters with respect to future provision of resources to the poor.

Contextually, is this not true reflecting on how President William Ruto has turned a controversially taxpayer funded housing scheme into a political edification programme? For instance, on what authority or moral grounds were representatives of teachers unions at State House this past weekend signing an agreement for allotment of 20 per cent of the affordable housing units? Haven’t we seen ordinary teachers of the very unions cry foul due to the pain the housing levy has inflicted on their household incomes?

Turning to the bad news for Kenya Kwanza strategists, they would better be advised to refer to a study by Jenny Guardado and Leonard Wantchekon published in the Journal of Electoral Studies, on June 2018. The two, are distinguished professors from the Georgetown and Princeton universities respectively. In this study, they find cash handouts have small to no effect on either voter turnout or vote shares using different matching techniques and accounting for district-level factors during the 2011 Beninese presidential elections.

These findings were cross-validated with additional surveys from four other African countries including Kenya, Mali, Botswana and Uganda. According to them, the results of the study suggest that within this contexts, vote-buying can best be understood as an incomplete transaction between candidates and voters.

Elena Gadjanova, in an article published by Democracy in Africa in 2018, finds consistent evidence using data collected in a fieldwork from two electoral units in Northern Ghana, where voter buying was normalized. According to the article, voter buying works best where inequality is high, information on politics and performance is low and ballots are closely monitored.

These conditions for voter buying to work become ineffective where voting is by secret ballot, a candidate performance record is known to voters and viable alternative candidates exists. This reality offers the weakest link to the President’s empowerment initiatives for three main reasons.

One, while President Ruto’s brand of politics has been fashioned around cash handouts, he faces a different generation of voters armed with better information on his performance record. After all, he does not have the monopoly over cash handouts to voters. The Gen Z uprising altered something fundamentally in our political ecosystem. For good or for bad, there would be very few people in this country today who do not know the President, by name or any of the nicknames he has earned for himself. Even small children know him.

Two, the trends from the sub-national elections will eventually catch-up with the presidential election. It is the same voters who have demonstrated a bloodbath at the ballot for governors, MPs and county assemblies. The stakes might be higher for the presidency, but the sweetness of teaching non-performing leaders a lesson at the ballot is contagious.

Furthermore, majority of voters understand that the cash handouts been dished out are taxpayers money that State House has simply chosen to abuse.

What harm does it make to enjoy part of what has simply been looted from the people?