Forget the past: Kenya finally has a digital election this year

ODM Kakamega County election board officials distribute election materials being in preparation for the party nominations in the county. PHOTO | BENSON AMADALA | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • There have been stories that money is being distributed via mobile money channels.
  • If political news, voter bribes, and other goodies are all going mobile, it will only speed up the shift towards a digital economy.
  • Mobile money became a supra state solution, because while the government couldn’t clear the roadblock for you, the technology leaped over it.

The party nominations in Kenya got as bad as they could, so we shall leave them and move on to other things. Not all was lost.

There are some developments in this election cycle that will lead to a good place, me thinks.

It is interesting, for example, that candidates are causing confusion and fanning violence by sending conflicting results about the nominations on WhatsApp.

For it to be a big enough problem, it means a lot of their constituents must be users of WhatsApp.

Also, it tells us that politicians are mining data, including information like voters’ mobile phone numbers.

MONEY DISTRIBUTED

Even in 2013, the politics hadn’t reached this level. Further back, all a politician needed was to go to a witchdoctor to pay for good luck, buy some chang’aa and cigarettes, and he was good.

Not any more. It looks like the scratch card has replaced chang’aa and cigarettes as the most precious item of voter bribery.

There have been stories that money is being distributed via mobile money channels.

The era when politicians would throw a few coins on the roadside as they drove along will soon be over.

If political news, voter bribes, and other goodies are all going mobile, it will only speed up the shift towards a digital economy.

When the elections end, we shall no longer have only broken-hearted losers, people nursing election violence injuries, and hangovers, as in the past.

DIGITAL ARCHITECTURE

We shall actually have a more robust digital architecture.

Remember, one of the best cases for M-Pesa was made by the 2008 post-election violence.

When party goons set up murderous roadblocks that you couldn’t cross, your relatives far away upcountry no longer had to starve. You could send them money by M-Pesa.

Mobile money became a supra state solution, because while the government couldn’t clear the roadblock for you, the technology leaped over it.

Some years ago, Karuti Kanyinga, a Nairobi university academic and also a columnist for this newspaper, made a presentation at a Nation Media Group roundtable.

He showed estimates of the cost of a vote (including the bribe for it) for an average candidate in Kenya.

MOBILE MONEY TRANSFERS

It had been rising sharply. People like Kanyinga can now dramatically improve their assessment of the cost of a vote, because the data for it is now more available in the form of mobile money transfers.

Their problem is different today — whether they can gain access to it.

Indeed, overall, we are seeing how a more technological landscape is affecting this campaign.

Facebook and Twitter pages, and for some gubernatorial candidates, websites, are replacing the poster.

Many young people are doing campaign jobs that didn’t exist 10 years ago, working as social media managers.

GOOD OMEN

If you trend on social media, positively, it is a good omen. But getting on social media means several things, including being more colourful. Everything has become a social media prop.

A campaign car, for example, can no longer be merely white. It has to be a loud colour. And you can no longer put in a show solo.

You need a convoy of cars all uniformly painted. Helicopters make for good social media images, and in another shift, we see them all painted in political colours and splashed with candidates’ images.

There is a lot of attention being paid by everyone, especially the party “principals”, about appearing in the same colours.

When the politicians are lined up on stage, they look like a choir in uniform. And they have figured out the colours that work.

Those earthly colours like brown, paying homage to the soil, are gone.

DIGITAL ERA
Machakos Governor Alfred Mutua, a man who knows a thing or two about the colour palettes for the digital era, went all in with loud purple for his Chap Chap party’s colours.

There are other small tweaks, designed to invoke nationalism in a period when there is a more provincial smell about the politics. So we see the uniform shirts the chiefs of the National Super Alliance (Nasa) have a dice of national colours.

The photoshopped busts of candidates on campaign posters are now competing with those that have them resting their chins on their hands — the Uhuru Kenyatta pose.

The key thing here are hands. And if you look closely, most of them have the candidates wearing bracelets of the Kenyan flag.

You might not notice it at a frenzied rally. But on social media, they are unmissable.

The author is publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. @cobbo3