Kalonzo should articulate policy positions better

Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka is not guaranteed to win the presidency in 2027. However, barring any unforeseen developments, he represents the best chance for Kenya to have the competitive presidential election we deserve.

We do not have a lazy electoral cycle marked by herding of Kenyans into their respective ethnic pens and low-brow politics of cynical mchongoano. We deserve a competitive politics characterised by high-minded discourse over policy and the future of the country. For that reason, Musyoka owes Kenyans a more serious campaign than what he has offered so far.

Back in 2022, we made a significant leap in the content of our politics. Thanks to the works of public intellectuals like David Ndii, Kwame Owino, Karuti Kanyinga, and others, economistic thinking became a staple of political discourse. We did politics not just in the language of “tyranny of numbers” and ethnic emotional blackmail, but also in terms of policy.

Thanks to the “bottom-up economic agenda” and the “hustler vs dynasty” sloganeering that went with it, the cost-of-living crisis, how to create more jobs, size of the public debt, utility of big projects like the Standard Gauge Railway, among others became commonplace discussions among the proverbial mama mbogas and boda bodas.

This was progress that we must build upon. And the only way to do so is to have serious presidential candidates with serious teams that can go toe to toe with the incumbent on policy. Unfortunately, as things stand, the opposition's best-placed candidate does not appear to have a clear strategy for handling policy discourse.

As I have argued before, President William Ruto will have the harder task of defending his record. Furthermore, the opposition as a whole will have the advantage of rhetoric – most potently being able to point to violations of the preamble of the Constitution by this administration.

However, the rhetoric of the opposition as a group must also be matched by a seriousness about the minutiae of policy from the main opposition candidate. President Ruto’s own 2022 campaign offers important lessons here.

Back then, he had a general dismissal of the Azimio campaign as a “dynastic project.” But beyond that, his campaign also went to great lengths to engage in policy dialogue at the county level. Those meetings earned the campaign credibility and cut through the standard electoral cynicism that Kenyans had become used to. They also certainly contributed to Ruto’s narrow win.

So far criticisms of Mr Musyoka have centred on his absence from the campaign trail. A section of Kenyans have argued that he seems to be waiting to be handed the presidency on a silver platter. I think the bigger mistake is that he does not seem to have a serious policy think tank behind his campaign. This is a problem.

One of the important lessons from the first two years of President Ruto’s term is that failure to plan on how to govern is a guaranteed recipe for failure. All serious presidential candidates must plan to be ready on day one on the job. And the best way to signal that is by having a serious policy think-tank, a communications strategy, and a candidate that takes Kenyans seriously enough to do the homework on policy.

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University