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The idea of "political debt" is as old as the hills. In 64 BC BC, the great Roman lawyer and speaker Marcus Tullius Cicero presented himself at the post of consul, the highest post of the former Roman Republic.
At the age of 42, Marcus was a brilliant and successful politician. But there was a strange thing against him: He was not a member of the nobility or "Patricians", the original, all-powerful aristocratic families who determined victory and defeat in the elections of ancient Rome. Ordinary, this factor would have removed him from consideration
but his brother, Quintus, gave Marcus timeless tricks now republished as the little book on How to Win an Election (2012). One of these tips dealt with "political debt" as the core of the art of politics
"Now is the time to call for all favors," he writes. . "Do not miss an opportunity to remind all those who are in your debt that they should repay you with their support."
But wise men also use election time as the time to incur new debts and win elections. "For those who owe you nothing, let them know that their timely help will put you in debt," Quintus advised.
To invoke political debts to win elections has become a noble and indelible feature of democracies. What is new – and odious and totally undemocratic – is the omnipresence in African politics of the idea that an entire ethnic population may owe a political debt to a politician unique or to his ethnicity and his family
. This malignant and combative thinking in Kenyan politics over the last five decades has become synonymous with war cry.
In the past, he unleashed politically inspired violence that spoiled the election.
Before the 2022 elections in Kenya, the strategists of Vice President William Ruto seem to have taken to heart the advice of Quintus to Marcus
However, the context, timing and tactics used by a section of jubilee mandarins to call Ruto's political debts before the elections of 2022 cut as smart as proverbial surgery with an ax. The polarizing public debate may inadvertently turn the "Uhuru Kenyatta Succession" into another electoral nightmare and a costly political affair in 2022.
The debate on "Ruto's political debt" has a familiar cause and context. It is linked to the extraconstitutional initiative known as the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), known as the "handshake" between President Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga in March of this year
. put an end to the double election of 2017, the longest and most expensive electoral crisis in the country of recent memory.
However, overnight, the pact became a sealed affair within the ruling Jubilee party. Ruto as an automatic successor to President Kenyatta
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