Why ethnic numbers alone won’t decide polls outcome

It is amazing that President Uhuru Kenyatta could win the August 8 elections. I say this because under normal circumstances, an incumbent presiding over runaway inflation, insecurity and grand corruption of the scale Kenya has recently experienced would be in the polling doldrums. Yet Mr Kenyatta persists as the frontrunner.

This reality is an invitation to think farther about the nature of our politics. Of course, most analysts will run to ethnicity and so-called tyranny of numbers as explanation for everything political in Kenya. They will say President Kenyatta is likely to win simply because, combined with William Ruto, he has the numbers to beat NASA (this is a dubious claim, by the way).