Opinion: Raise quality of voter engagement on issues

As the country prepares for the August elections, one cannot fail to notice the absence of a single national coalescing narrative by leading political parties. Elections are part organisation and part strategic communication.

It is not just about manufacturing the greatest amounts of abuse and ridicule against your opponent and using tired clichés and slogans that are disjointed from the very concerns, needs, challenges that voters grapple with every day. It is this aspect of how best to fashion and frame a coalescing narrative that requires focus if the coming elections are to add value to political discourse and foreground leaders who can deliver change and progress.

For us to appreciate the extent of this crisis, we have to appreciate the fact that narratives of our nationhood and statehood have been framed for a long time by the elite profiteers who took hold of the state post-independence. Nationhood has and still remains a contested matter despite the contribution of the Constitution in terms of re-addressing the State- Society contract.

RALLYING SLOGANS

During the de jure era, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta through the Harambee narrative rallied the masses towards nation building but ostensibly rejected the accountability aspects that the true Harambee narrative demanded especially in terms of land justice. The Nyayo narrative fared no better as it strove to compare Kenya with her regional neighbours descending into war and anarchy therefore, in essence, justified economic haemorrhage through nepotism and corruption just because the country was peaceful.

The NARC regime narrative of ‘Yote Yawezekana bila Moi’ (it is all possible without Moi) sought to paint a departure from the Nyayo error but failed spectacularly to deal with the rampant nature of ‘capture power by all means necessary’, which led to the violent explosion in 2007.

In 2013, the Uhuru- Ruto anti ICC narrative tweaked with the Pentecostal flavour of ‘Jubilee’ as a biblical year of rest allowed the duo to rally their ethnic bases towards electoral victory but five years down the line and the ICC cases no longer a threat, the duo are grappling to craft another rallying narrative towards the 2017 elections.

They have tried with the Transforming Kenya line and Jubilee Delivers taglines but still, counter narratives in terms of failures and blunders witnessed in their tenure continue to deliver impotence to their mass acceptance.

The Opposition have not fared any better. The main obsession has been to paint Jubilee as a collective band of looters but they haven’t provided evidence of how they intend to strengthen the accountability and protect national resources once they get to power. The hype characterised by the large political rallies they have been attracting is yet to provide a suitable national inclusive vision of how NASA will be able to turn around the alleged economic misfortunes that the incumbent has supervised.

It is therefore disheartening that voters have no political fodder to shape their conversations in an informed manner with data and evidence. It is not just a crisis of depending on politicians to run Presidential Campaign Secretariats as opposed to seasoned professionals drawn from various fields of expertise.

It is also the superficial nature that politicians attach to issues of nation building. They think more about rallies but not about the messaging. They hardly have time to map out the core issues that citizens in the counties they are going to are grappling with.

The incumbent thinks going to launch a project and spend hours talking about how much money the Government has allocated to the area is all that matters while the Opposition thinks going to the same area and discrediting what the Government has done will translate into votes. None of them undertakes a micro-level research to keenly pick out the pulse of the county and frame the same in a strong and passionate campaign message.

On the other hand, if you look at the messaging that is ongoing in the United Kingdom in the run-up to the June elections, there is a vast difference simply because of the heavy investment in combining sentiment mining with strategic communications. I recently came across an email from the Labour party leadership that had a set of questions from Jeremy Corbyn to Theresa May.

Some of the questions asked included: ‘How can Andy’s grown-up, employed children afford to move out?’, ‘What should Laura do as she teaches a class with fewer and fewer resources?’ ‘What will Maureen and other women do now their pension age has been pushed back?’

Looking at these set of questions, one can appreciate that the brief given to the communications agency contracted by the Labour party is actually offering them value by allowing them to tap key issues from the wider society and provide targeted messaging. It is this height of strategic voter engagement that our political parties need to attain if we are to meaningfully engage in the issues that matter this election year.

Mr Wanyonyi is a specialist on Media Regulation and Strategic Communications. edward.marks09@gmail.com