Why NASA should not take Coast support for granted

The Coast region has not been associated with any serious national party since 1964, when the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), led by Ronald Ngala, was dissolved.

In 1992, a bearded radical and former MP for Kilifi South named Chibule wa Tsuma, ran for the presidency, but coastal voters were not impressed. Chibule came a distant sixth below the winner – former President Moi – who received most of the votes from the Coast.

While the Islamic Party of Kenya was denied registration earlier that year, leading to a number of street battles between its supporters and the police in Mombasa, subsequent Coast-based parties, such as Shirikisho and KADU-Asili, have had little impact at regional and national levels. This has fed into common feelings by those who consider themselves ‘indigenous’ to the Coast, of marginalisation and exclusion from national political proceedings.

In light of this, a number of key points should be considered by NASA, especially after it recently unveiled a strategy document dubbed ‘Pwani ni NASA’. The plan is to mobilise a coastal voter turn-out of 85 per cent in the August General Election, and lock out the Jubilee Party in a region NASA considers a stronghold.

Two lessons can be gleaned from the outcome of the recent party primaries.

Firstly, it is instructive to note that except for Kwale and Taita-Taveta counties, there was hardly any competition for party tickets, especially for the gubernatorial race, arguably, the most important after the presidential contest. In an interesting trend, hopefuls for the governor’s seat avoided competing with their rivals for party tickets, and decamped to, or stayed in parties that they felt would favour them.

As a result, most gubernatorial aspirants run unopposed and were handed direct nomination certificates. Others, like Hezron Awiti Bolo, the former national treasurer of the Wiper, joined little-known parties (in Awiti’s case, the Vibrant Democratic Party) mainly for fear that they would not make it through the nominations if they remained in the ‘well-established’ parties.

Raila’s reduced vote

Consequently, NASA-affiliate parties -- in addition to Jubilee, a plethora of briefcase parties and a notable number of independent candidates -- have all presented candidates for the region’s elective seats. The crucial aspect in this outcome is obvious – it poses the risk of lowering Raila’s vote in August 8. Granted, this trend is discernable across the country. However, for a region long described (at least since 2007) as the stronghold of one party, one fails to notice Raila’s inability during the 2013 and in this year’s elections, to ensure his coalition presents single candidates within coastal counties for important seats such as the governor and senator, like he has been well capable of doing in Luo Nyanza.

In addition, results of the 2013 elections at the Coast suggest that support for ODM was not unequivocal.

The presidential vote was itself, at best, of secondary importance to many voters, and at worst, insignificant. Also secondary was party choice. Close to people’s hearts were local contests and rivalries, invigorated by the introduction of five county-level seats, whose control was contested on the basis of the activation of local patronage networks, including local narratives of communal grievance -- the often cited Swahili, Arab, and Mijikenda tensions.

In this way, Hassan Joho won Mombasa’s governorship, less because he supported Raila, and definitely not because of any logistical or financial support Raila gave him (which was minimal) but because he applied his personal resources and skills in lining up the support of local businessmen and mobilising a veritable, urban-based multi-ethnic vote.

In fact, most of the seats taken by ODM at the coast in 2013 were not won because of the party’s popularity in the region, but rather on the strength of the personalities running on the party’s ticket.

This is why ODM lost the Mombasa senate seat to WDM through Hassan Omar. Nor did party choice matter in Kaloleni constituency, where the ODM candidate lost to Mwinga Gunga of KADU-Asili. ODM also lost the Lamu and Tana River governor races to UDF and WDM respectively.

Cost of Joho’s rising star

In Kwale, where MRC sentiment was strongest, ODM won a majority of seats due to a mixture of wide distrust against Uhuru Kenyatta (a Kikuyu candidate), and the ethnic competition between Digo on one side and Duruma-Kamba on the other. In Kilifi, distrust against Uhuru, rather than love for Raila, was decisive, and it helped push ODM’s vote – as was clear from the fact that the results of the ODM primaries for governor declaring Amason Kingi the winner were hotly contested.

Equally, a combination of ethnic competition between Taveta and Kamba on one side, and Taita on another, gave John Mruttu a slight margin over his closest challenger, Jacinta Mwatela of WDM. Mruttu, like Joho in Mombasa, did not win with a definitive landslide over his closest challenger.

The second lesson – discernible from an appreciation of the recent political history of the Coast – is the region’s traditional antagonisms between Arab, Swahili and Mijikenda.
And this is where Jubilee has sought to make its entry into the region’s share of votes.

Since 2013, a number of coastal politicians who were elected on an ODM ticket have decamped to Jubilee. Some, such as Gideon Mung’aro of Kilifi, Suleiman Shahball of Mombasa, and Salim Mvurya of Kwale, are currently running on Jubilee tickets for various seats.

In a poor reading of local political dynamics, NASA has elected, in the ‘Pwani ni NASA’ strategy, to brand these politicians as ‘traitors’ who have gone against the aspiration of coastal people by supporting a government deemed not to have the region’s interest at heart. In my view, the ‘vibahasha’ narrative that has been peddled by Coast ODM politicians conceals deeper complexities, and these can be related to the recent rise of Joho.

A former MP and a successful local businessman, Joho made his mark in 2013, when he campaigned for, and won the Mombasa governor’s seat. His campaign activated the local patronage network needed to oil a political machinery using the ODM brand. He named it ‘Team Joho’, and strategically placed powerful local businessmen amongst its structures. They included his brother Abubakar and businessman Mohamed Jaffer; men who had, during the Moi and Kibaki regimes, cultivated relationships with national politicians and won lucrative government tenders, especially at the Port of Mombasa.

In the regional campaign for ODM, these men operated with considerable autonomy from ODM’s national office, and despite a vigorous Jubilee campaign that brought Uhuru and William Ruto to the Coast more than once, the president captured a much smaller proportion of votes than Kibaki had in 2007. Joho’s efforts outshone those of other regional political bosses within the CORD brigade, and he was generously rewarded with the post of deputy party leader of ODM, second only to Raila Odinga.

Since 2013, Joho’s administration in Mombasa (and his dominance within coastal ODM affairs in general) has been widely accused of favouritism, nepotism, lowering of professional standards and corruption, especially in the awarding of tenders and in recruitment for county jobs. Disagreements concerning the latter explains the fall-out between Joho and Hassan Omar, the Senator, and also with Mohamed Jaffer (a Raila supporter), who, among other things, publicly supported Lamu gubernatorial candidature of Salim Imu under a WDM ticket.

Old narrative

Following in this precedent, it may therefore not be utterly improbable to suggest that many of those who decamped to Jubilee – majority of whom are Mijikenda politicians – may have done so due to an incessant ‘politics of madharau’ that most Mijikenda (elite and ‘ordinary’ people alike) have felt under the economic (and at times, racial) dominance of Swahili-Arab communities at the Coast.

This narrative is old, alive and well, and Joho’s rise in ODM, and at the Coast, may serve to its further entrenchment, a fact that will temper NASA’s dominance at the Coast.
But I could also be wrong.

The writer is a PhD candidate at Durham University, United Kingdom.

ngala.k.chome@gmail.com