Exit poll wouldn’t have helped Kenya

By Dominic Odipo

For three days in December 2007, Kenya slid into chaos as ballot counters took what appeared to be a presidential election victory for the challenger and delivered it to the incumbent.

"As tensions mounted, Kenneth Flottman sat in Nairobi and grew increasingly frustrated. He had in his hands the results of an exit poll, paid for by the American government, that supported the initial returns favouring... Raila Odinga."

This excerpt is from an article in the New York Times on January 31 this year, co-authored by Mike McIntire and Jeffrey Gettleman. Another article published in The Nation (an American paper) on December 10, 2008, written by Karen Rothmyer, covers the same ground. The two basic questions raised by the articles are:

One, should the results of the American exit poll, which were available by the evening of election day, have been immediately released for publication or not? And, if they had been released, would they have had a significant impact on the official election returns and, therefore, on the post-election violence that claimed more than 1,300 lives?

Or, to put the second question differently, did the failure to release the results of the American exit poll amount to unmitigated support for the beleaguered Kibaki Government, effectively fueling the post-election violence?

Opinion appears to be rather generously split on all these questions. There are those who argue that the exit poll results should have been immediately released and published, no matter what their real impact later turned out to be.

There are those who argue that it was squarely in the national interest to suppress those poll results so as not to inflame an already explosive situation. There are those who say that publishing the poll results, whatever they were, would have had absolutely no impact.

Foreign influence

And there are those who are absolutely convinced that failure to release and publish those exit polls was just a thinly veiled attack on the ODM side and a clear attempt to scuttle Raila’s presidential chances.

To get a clearer picture of this whole issue, we need to address three basic questions: The nature of the exit poll, the setting and the real reason why Kenyans turned on one another.

First, the poll itself: The most important thing about the poll was not what it actually said, but that it was a foreign poll — an American one in this case — not a local one (albeit conducted by a local partner). To release an American poll at that particular time favouring any one side would have been picked on by the opposing side as a blatant attempt by foreigners to influence the final results of the elections.

If whoever had the final say here had released the poll results saying that Raila Odinga had won the election, the PNU side would have taken that as a clear signal that it was under siege and it would almost certainly have dug in, calling all its supporters to the colours, fueling violence. This means that the most pragmatic and diplomatic approach was, in fact, to postpone the release and publication of the exit poll. In one word, to ‘suppress’ the poll results for the time being.

The next question is that of the setting. By the morning of December 28, 2007, tensions all across the country were already so high that no single poll could effectively have changed anything. The protagonists had already dug into their respective positions and no poll was going to change those positions.

Plus, how were the results going to be effectively disseminated? Live coverage of any news was banned, newspapers were not circulating across the country and most Kenyans had lost trust in both KBC, the national broadcaster, and Citizen Radio and TV, the only other outlet with national reach for radio and TV.

This means that the youths who were setting up death road blocks in such places as Eldoret, Naivasha, Kisumu and Mumias would not have heard or believed the exit poll results anyway. What would have been the value of a foreign exit poll result that political troops on the ground would not have known about anyway?

Finally, what was the real reason why Kenyans so murderously turned on each other in December, 2007? It was that the PNU side had decided, long before the election, not to relinquish power, no matter what.

The security services, the police, the Electoral Commission and other State organs had already been primed to ensure that power did not pass to the Opposition at whatever cost. In this scheme of things, the release and publication of one American exit poll result would have been of absolutely no consequence. That is the hard truth. In fact, those who "suppressed" the exit poll results, whoever they were, did this country a great service!

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

[email protected]