Middle East & Africa | First we take Nairobi

In Africa, city elections are where the action is

As people move to the cities, ethnic politics may give way to something new

Who’s the boss?
|NAIROBI

AT A street corner in Kangemi, a neighbourhood of tin-roofed shacks and new brick tenements in the west of Nairobi, men huddle into what are called street parliaments. Standing several deep, they debate politics, each man speaking in turn, with a moderator at the centre. “We are done with these thieves,” says Jeremiah Mukaiti, a 53-year-old caretaker. “We need change.” Others pipe up with similar complaints. “The government is doing nothing. They steal money, and their promises come to nothing,” says Cyrus Injiloa, a 36-year-old security guard.

Much of the talk is about the general elections, which are scheduled for August. Voters will pick from candidates running for president right down to those standing as municipal councillors. Uhuru Kenyatta, the president, will probably win a second term; no incumbent Kenyan president has ever lost an election.

Go down a level, however, and politics is far more competitive, especially in Nairobi county, which includes the capital. The incumbent governor is Evans Kidero, a former businessman and a member of the opposition National Super Alliance. This year, Mr Kidero is fighting for his political future. It is a similar story in Mombasa, the second biggest city, where Governor Hassan Joho, a major opposition leader, faces a tight reelection campaign.

This pattern, in which opposition parties control big cities, is mirrored in many African states. Across the continent 85% of incumbent presidents who stand again win re-election. And ruling parties often dominate national assemblies for decades.

Yet competition is thriving in the cities. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s commercial capital, the opposition won the mayoralty last year for the first time ever. In Kampala, Uganda’s capital, opposition parties dominate the city council, much to the chagrin of Yoweri Museveni, who has been president since 1986. In South Africa, the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) won Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria last year, and has governed Cape Town since 2006. Of South Africa’s big cities, only Durban is in the hands of the ruling African National Congress.

Such competition for cities and states in Africa can sometimes drive reform, says Nicholas Cheeseman of Oxford University. In South Africa the DA faces a huge challenge living up to voters’ expectations. If it fails to improve people’s lives, it could lose its strongholds. If it governs better than the ANC, it stands a chance of using cities as a springboard to winning more provinces (it already governs the Western Cape) or even to challenging the ANC’s majority in parliament in 2019.

Similar strategies have been pursued by opposition parties elsewhere. In Nigeria, for instance, the Lagos state government was run for close to two decades by an opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). The APC’s record in Lagos, which raises much of its own revenue and provides better services than many other states, helped it win the presidency in 2015. (That was the first time an incumbent Nigerian president had been peacefully removed at the ballot box.)

If city politics can sway the national sort, that bodes well for the future. Africa is urbanising faster than any other region: half of Africans will live in cities by 2035, according to the UN, up from around a third now. Yet Mr Cheeseman frets that competition in local politics could equally lead to the rise of “ethno-populism”. Enterprising rabble-rousers, he fears, could use a mix of vote-buying and ethnic mobilisation to win control of local resources.

Specs and the city

One place where a new kind of politics is erupting is Nairobi. The governor’s race is thrilling this year thanks to the arrival of Mike Sonko (pictured, in patriotic sunglasses) a candidate for the ruling Jubilee party. Mr Sonko’s adopted name means “the boss” in Sheng, the Swahili-English creole used in Nairobi slums, and it reflects his colourful style. Mr Sonko was once ordered out of Kenya’s parliament for refusing to remove his earrings and sunglasses; he often wears huge gold chains, and drives a gold-plated SUV.

Mr Sonko also has a controversial past. In 2010 he was named in Parliament by Kenya’s then interior minister as being suspected of dealing drugs. (Mr Sonko could not be reached for comment despite repeated attempts by The Economist.) More than that, though, he is a populist. Part of his appeal among the poor is that he showers his own money on local services such as free ambulances (called the “Sonko Rescue Team”); he has promised to upgrade slums and cut taxes paid by market traders.

If Mr Sonko were to win it would be a blow to the various opposition parties that had hoped to use their grip over cities such as Nairobi and Mombasa to build up their share of the national vote. Yet it would also reflect a slow change in how Kenyan politics works. For the most part Kenyans vote along ethnic lines. To win a national election politicians have to build ethnic coalitions, bringing in enough small groups to win the “tribal mathematics”. But in cities such as Nairobi people seem to be moving away from voting along tribal lines. That may favour Mr Sonko, who—with an adopted name—hides his ethnic background and tries to appeal to all of the city’s dwellers.

Simon Musyoka, a motorbike taxi driver who lives in Mathare, is from the Kamba tribe, and shares his name with a prominent opposition politician. Nonetheless, he is voting for Mr Sonko. “He is a rich man, but he knows what life is like for slum people,” he says.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "First we take Nairobi"

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