Where Are The Advisers?

The full version of what was published in the Daily Nation, February 12 2013

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008,  he had an inadvertent effect on Kenyan politics which is only now coming to fruition. His was a slick campaign, dependent on social media innovation, beguiling speechmaking and reliance on technology. It was guaranteed that this (somewhat) son of our fecund soil would be copied when we came to the first full election since his successful forays of 2008 and 2012.

So wannabe commanders-in-chief have rolled out every ersatz trick in the book. Party events are slickly produced and televised live to (awed, or jaded) audiences. Candidates are competing to give speeches off teleprompters and tablet computers. Families have suddenly been incorporated, and they have had the requisite effect of wowing the younger set. We now no longer have (boring) party nominations and cronies; there are now primaries and running mates.

There’s one part of the American political playbook that we have forgotten to copy, though, and it’s one of the more important ones. It is to the detriment of the campaigns we are witnessing, and to the government that will be formed after the conclusion of the election. American presidential candidates are, by this time, surrounded by a formidable phalanx of advisors, who they roll out to great effect.

The American political system, which typically throws up insurgent candidates who take on the might of their political parties, tends to have deep benches of policy experts who pledge themselves to political candidates early on in the electoral cycle. These commitments serve a mutual role: signifying the seriousness of a presidential bid; and putting in first dibs on prospects for high-end jobs in new administrations.

In every election since 1968, the successful candidate (except for George Bush in 1988) has been an insurgent of some sort, and has successfully used these experts to test particular policy waters, and to sometimes serve as campaign surrogates when what is needed is less heat and more light. The list of experts who then went on to serve with distinction is a long one: Henry Kissinger (under Richard Nixon in 1968); Zbigniew Brzezinski (Carter 1976); Richard Holbrooke and Anthony Lake (Clinton 1992); Condoleezza Rice (Bush 2000) and Susan Rice and Samantha Power (Obama 2008). While this list is largely in the foreign policy field, experts have been deployed in defence policy (Donald Rumsfeld for Bush in 2000) and economic policy (Robert Reich and Austan Goolsbee for Obama in 2008).

The advisers lend gravitas to a campaign, and help to signal to certain important constituencies that they have little to fear if their candidate wins. If the candidate is perceived as being too left-wing, a bit of Wall Street expertise flanking him on the campaign trail is a dog whistle to the business community that the candidate is not a wooly-headed communist. If the candidate is too far to the right, the appropriate set of advisers can make her, if not cuddly, at least not the embodiment of the ugly American with an itchy trigger finger.

In a system such as the United Kingdom, there isn’t much need to signal seriousness with the choice of advisors. This is because, in this case, there is already a government-in-waiting, in the form of the Shadow Cabinet.

In Kenya, we have adopted neither method. The Shadow Cabinet became permanently tainted when President Moi used it as an expletive at the height of the pro-democracy struggle. And the surrogates sent out onto the campaign trail tend to be the loudest and most entertaining crusaders. Those with the longest CVs and most credible credentials are nowhere to be seen.

This is a disservice, especially this time round. The cabinet will, from April, be manned (hopefully) by professionals, who will be drawn from academia and the professional ranks. Not a single candidate has even intimated as to who their preferred cabinet members are. Ambitious professors and CEOs are also being unnecessarily coy. They are not hitching their stars to bandwagons, and we are left guessing about their intentions by the pattern of resignations and ethnic origin.

With less than a month before the first round of voting, we’ll perhaps not see constellations of experts flanking presidential candidates, but one hopes that this is the last election where such reticence is the order of the day.