2022 IFRA Elections Team
“Inside The MCA Campaign” is a photo-reportage delving into the campaign strategies and manifestos of MCA aspirants in different regions of the country. IFRA research team captured why the aspirants entered politics, why they chose a particular party for vying for power, their strategy in the campaign they conducted, the specific challenges they faced, and the political programs they proposed to improve the lives of Kenyan citizens. Find out more of MCAs, the new figure of power in Kenya..

“Mobilizing Voters” captures the spirit of Kenya’s 2022 election at ground level. It takes you right into the colorful campaign, rallying and voting. IFRA’s visual documentary explores vivid electoral and political issues through photography and text, up to the challenging of the presidential results in court.

For the August 2022 elections in Kenya, IFRA has set up a collaborative research team of junior and senior researchers, mostly from Kenyan universities, with strong backgrounds in the social sciences. They are documenting and analysing the elections from different perspectives and on a variety of social, political and economic themes.
This projet is part of IFRA’s Observatory of East African Elections.
August 9, 2022: Kenyan citizens are going to vote for the 3rd time under the new Constitution promulgated in 2010. Constitutional reforms strove to democratize the state machinery through devolution and institutionalization of public participation in decision-making. Dismantling the historical centralization of power in the executive (especially in the Presidency) – notably through devolution – aimed to defuse political tension during electoral cycles . Yet, the 2013 and 2017 electoral cycles, with their contestations, unabated state-driven violence, and political condescension for national and supra-national judicial processes, demonstrated that institutional change and democratization are non-linear, iterative and contradictory processes, never straightforward.
Are the 2022 elections going to be different from the previous ones, and in which ways? What appears unprecedented is that the two major presidential coalitions looming large in the 2022 Kenyan political landscape represent a considerable reshuffle of historical political positioning, with the unprecedented alliance of two families (or dynasties, to use the Kenyan parlance) – the Kenyattas and Odingas –, opposed since Independence (1963), now seemingly joined together to support Raila Odinga’s presidential candidacy. The disintegration of UhuRuto Alliance has heavily impacted the political landscape, radically reconfiguring the architecture of political alliances.
With the founding of a de facto opposition movement, William Ruto has adopted a very populist and anti-establishment election propaganda campaign. The Hustler Nation rhetoric and so-called Bottom-Up approach are proving very appealing because of the perception of intersectional injustices perpetrated by the incumbent government, unpopular inter alia because of skyrocketing of the cost of living. Moreover, Raila Odinga is in the difficult situation of being allied to the government, and thus labelled an electoral ‘project’ by his Ruto-led adversaries. He has thus lost the antagonistic charm that used to characterize him. IFRA research team is investigating how such new cleavages and rhetoric disocurses translate in different regional and local contexts.
Also, given the polarization of the political systems during the early stages of the campaign, post-electoral contestation and violence are likely to occur. Forms of violence during electoral cycles in Kenya shall be understood in sensu lato, by no means limiting the scope to what has been termed “ethnic clashes” in hotspot areas, which are the Rift Valley, the North-East and the Coast. The occurrence of violence is the apex of socio-political and historical phenomena, whose contextualization is not only necessary but fundamental in order to better explain the violence and its impact on electoral performances and outcomes. There are at least three forms of violence that can be detected during Kenyan electoral cycles since the advent of multi-party politics, on which IFRA team researchers are focusing.
1/ Politicization of historical land claims, by which some candidates seek to foment violence by indigenous constituents that targets immigrant communities, their presence being framed as “alien” and thus undesirable, especially in the Rift Valley and on the coast.
2/ Militarization of youth groups, which involves the formation of gangs that are usually disbanded after the electoral cycle. They are sponsored by politicians and businessmen to harass and even commit deadly attacks in order to coerce residents of opposing political affiliations to vote in a certain way or to punish them for not voting as desired. This phenomenon thrives on youth socio-economic vulnerability, especially in urban informal settlement in Nairobi, Kisumu and Mombasa.
3/ State violence refers to grave violations of human rights perpetrated by the state. These include repression of demonstrations by police and other security personnel who are purposefully violent, whose anti-riot equipment includes rifles, and intimidation of other state officials (e.g., electoral commissioners and judges) that can escalate to murder. Police officers, or more often men in police and military uniforms, are the perpetrators of violence, leaving unclear just where within the state apparatus such orders originate. A looming sense of impunity is pervasive, which increases mistrust in state institutions and state-driven processes, including elections.
Once again, Kenyan political institutions are put at the test: it remains to be seen what will be the perceived legitimacy and level of democratic performance of the institutions mandated to organize and safeguard the elections, such as the IEBC, the National Cohesion and Integration Commission, the Police, and the Judiciary. To what extent are key institutional actors pursuing their mandates without falling prey to (or even just being ‘influenced’ by) ‘hostile powers’? These crucial questions that this research project aims to examine, given their importance in the institutionalization of Kenya’s evolving democracy.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
IFRA Nairobi (August 25, 2022). 2022 IFRA Elections Team. IFRA Nairobi. Retrieved April 21, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/pw2h