The 0.01% debacle reveals how Raila Amolo Odinga surrounds himself with incompetence that has made him a perennial loser

If there was something I didn’t expect is Raila Amolo Odinga losing the 2022 presidential election. This is a guy who most probably won the 2007 presidential election. If he himself believes that he won the election, then he must have known the right things he did in 2007. He equally must have known how the 2007 win was snatched from him if at all. It follows therefore that a person who has learnt his lessons ought to have put in place measures to guarantee his win when he was vying for the same seat in 2013. But what we saw is that he went into the 2013 election unprepared; as if he had learnt absolutely nothing from his 2007 experience. The fact that the Supreme Court dismissed his 2013 presidential petition speaks about his unpreparedness for the 2013 presidential election.

Raila Amolo Odinga vied again in 2017, a time we expected him to have had twice as much lessons learned compared to 2013. If it was the fact that those charged with coming up with and implementing campaign strategies were the incompetent ones in 2013, then in 2017 we expected him to have known better. But 2017 was yet another devastating loss in the hands of Uhuru Mwigai Kenyatta. From 2017 to now, Raila must have known all the avenues through which elections are rigged to ensure all those avenues are closely watched to safeguard his votes. But here we are again, talking about another loss, a loss that comes at the backdrop of state, system, and deep state supporting the man. One may wonder, what’s wrong with the man? The answer is incompetence.

Other than 2007, Raila Odinga appears to have surrounded himself with incompetent shallow-minded advisers who cannot plan, cannot calculate political manoeuvres, and cannot executive any political strategies. He recruits people who are incapable of performing proper SWOT analysis, incapable of proactively dealing with the weaknesses and threats identified by the SWOT analysis, and incapable of understanding simple arithmetic operations. You only need to read the opinion pieces penned by a one Prof. Makau Mutua in Nation.Africa to understand the level of incompetence that surrounds Raila Amolo Odinga.

Let me talk about the inability of those surrounding Raila Amolo Odinga to perform simple arithmetic operations in more detail. As we all know, elections are about numbers. By the time someone decides to vie for an elective position, he must have a mechanism by which he determines his chances of winning. He must ask himself the question, “if I vie, how many votes am I likely to get?” “Where are those votes likely to come from?” “What demographic characteristics do these voters have in common?” Understanding these numbers from the perspective of the probability of winning will inform his campaign plan, resource mobilisation, resource distribution, and vote guarding strategies. But you cannot have people who are incapable of understanding simple arithmetic operations be the ones behind a comprehensive and massive project as a national presidential campaign.

We had a glimpse of arithmetic incompetence in those surrounding Raila during the Supreme Court proceedings of the presidential petition in 2017. During that petition, the ODM member of Parliament for Rarieda Amollo Otiende could not properly explain a simple line equation in the form of y = mx + c to prove to the court how an algorithm predetermined a constant gap between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga. He explained his inability to provide the expected explanation as a lack of mathematical understanding, yet a line equation is one of the simplest forms of mathematical equations one can come across in high school.

Then we were treated with yet another incompetence by four IEBC commissioners who made a huge mistake by pointing out a rounding approximation as an error that can have a significant effect on the percentage of votes William Ruto got against total valid votes. The media houses during prime time news spent several minutes trying to demonstrate just how grave an error Juliana Whonge Cherera, the IEBC deputy chair, made. These four IEBC commissioners are supposedly the people who were meant to help Raila Odinga grab the presidency.

When Raila Amolo Odinga surrounds himself with such incompetent people who cannot understand simple line equations and arithmetics, how would he expect them to properly plan for agents to be in every single polling station, and for those agents to have the means by which they promptly report the announced results to Raila’s tallying centre? Even if these agents were able to report their figures and any potential evidence for electoral malpractice to Raila’s tallying centre, are these incompetent people able to ensure a smooth operation of the tallying centre? And here I assume the tallying centre is actually available and fitted with the latest data handling technologies.

We know that in every electoral cycle Raila has lacked agents in major areas, particularly in areas where his opponents have an upper hand in the rigging. This happened in 2007, 2013, and 2017. Despite these obvious facts, Raila has not been able to adequately address the weakness and threats that emanate from the poor deployment of agents to every single polling station. In addition to that, the agents meant to guard Raila’s votes in places where they are deployed have always complained about poor pay or no pay at all. It appears that the focus of Raila’s incompetent campaign teams has always been on rallies and advertisements, but even so, those programmes haven’t been optimized to ensure a wider national reach.

Raila’s inability to deploy and properly take care of agents in all polling stations has been his greatest undoing. This has been mainly because he has depended on sycophants who are ready to do whatever he says, instead of listening to professionals who understand what needs to be done in order to deliver the vote. Even as he goes to the Supreme court with the intention of having the court nullify the declaration of William Ruto as President-Elect, he still doesn’t have the proper machinery to ensure that he both reaches everyone who would vote for him and then safeguards the votes they would give him.

In the event that the Supreme Court grants him a rerun (or a runoff), he will still lose – unless he gets rid of the incompetence that has defined his campaigns after the 2007 elections.