The messenger and his message.

"You don't need billions, millions to become the Deputy President of Kenya." ~ William Ruto, Deputy President of Kenya.

How true.

Mohammed Abduba Dida was the highlight of the 2013 general election. His approach to the presidential election was methodical, if a little eccentric. He would meet the people. If they agreed with him, they would elect him; if they didn't agree with him, they would elect someone else. There were no unfriendly rumours of the billions, or millions, he was spending to hire helicopters or 4x4s to get him from campaign venue to campaign venue. 

There were no ugly rumours that he had bribed anyone to vote for him. He did not make promises that were unrealistic. Despite his apparent probity, the former teacher was not elected, his ideas were scoffed at by the punditocracy, and he has since faded from public view. But it is not because he lacked the billions or millions that the Jubilee or CORD teams spent that Mr Dida was not elected; it is because he dared to suggest that wealth was not a relevant criterion for political office and that all one needed was common sense, a great measure of integrity, a large dollop of political honesty and a realistic outlook of what the nation is and what it can be. As it is, of the candidates who were seen as no-hoppers, Mr Dida was first among them, surprisingly beating Martha Karua and Peter Kenneth in the number of votes garnered.

The Deputy President, humble-bragging about his rise to the second-highest political office in the land, attempted to pass off as his own Mr Dida's message. I do not think many people were persuaded. Many Kenyans who voted for him probably did not watch that news broadcast on which the Deputy President, so they may not appreciate the irony of a man who admits to be a part-owner in a multi-million shilling hotel with dubious antecendents preaching to them the virtues of hard work and diligence in the pursuit of high public office.

Kenyans are not idiots. Kenyan voters are definitely not idiots. The choices they make are informed by many factors, not just the ethnicity of the candidate or the size of the campaign war chest. More often than not Kenyan voters will elect or re-elect the devil they know than the angel they don't, and Mr Dida was just too unknown to make a credible presidential candidate. But far more than anything, the billions that Jubilee spent to elect its candidates did not go unnoticed and a beneficiary of those billions is the last person to remind Kenyans that billions and millions are not consequential in an election.