The Political Projects Phase

With few months to the 2027 ballot, elected leaders from different offices are increasingly visible on the ground interacting with the electorate and in a frenzy of launching one project after the other.

In politics, a project can be more than that physical structure for the community wellbeing. Think of that individual propped up by an office holder as a tool of dividing the vote and deny that aspirant the chance of torpedoing the incumbent from the office. On the national political stage, Ndindi Nyoro is suspiciously viewed as a president William Ruto's mole planted to divide the Mt Kenya region votes in a region currently hostile to the president. 

At the constituency level, my area member of Parliament, Irene Njoki, of Bahati constituency, is said to be sponsoring to aspirants to neuter the politician ambitions of one aspirant, Mary Justus Mannabay.

Those could be political human projects, but do you know the incumbents from the president down to the MCAs too can be projects as well?

We're in that phase where the elected office holders are now the projects themselves. The become the face of the projects they're launching not as legacy projects but as platforms to campaign for their reelection. You'll see the president in impromptu tours of inspecting ongoing development projects, commissioning or launching new ones, handing keys to beneficiaries of completed affordable housing units as cameras rolls and light flashes in ribbon cutting ceremonies.

Nakuru county governor projects are now visible. The other day she was launching the Molo Level IV hospital (pictured), with several other health facilities set for ribbon cutting soon. A project launching her projects is not a political anathema, but using them for political optics.

The political projects countrywide knows how to appeal to the electorate. How do you expect them to serve a single term yet you're seeing the tangible deliverables that'll impact a given sector of economy in a positive way? That hospital is a relief to patients that used to travel from far to the only referral facility in the county for treatment, for it brings services closer to the populace. That morgue cuts cost of funeral services by shortening the distance, or solving that logistics nightmare.

Irene Njoki, for example, is using sections of a tarmacked key feeder road not as the talking point of her stewardship but as a bragging point that no leadership before her had thought of upgrading roads in the constituency to bitumen standards, until she happened. That's a fallacy that had failed to sell, as section of same route had bit of tarmac.

The political projects say their physical projects are ones of their kind and they're best placed to complete or transform their areas of representation completely, and deservedly need a fresh mandate in the office. Ruto has successfully sold the marginalization card to communities that would have otherwise not backed him politically like in Luo Nyanza and the coast.

The political project will not tell you some of their physical projects are there courtesy of external funding that the taxpayers, and their generations, will foot. That shiny jewel like Talanta stadium could be a Ruto's legacy project, but something that'll saddle the taxpayers with debts in the long run.