Uhuru Kenyatta: The triumph of public relations

TNA, Uhuru Kenyatta's party. The semblance of the bird icon to Twitter's logo could be a deliberate move to endear the party's candidate to middle class voters.

Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta is Kenya’s fourth president. This is after surviving a grueling General Election, which ended up in the Supreme Court of Kenya. The court upheld the election of Kenyatta and his Jubilee Alliance running mate, William Samoei Ruto, currently the Deputy President. 

How did this happen, many have wondered.

Concurring that this was far from a predictable win, pundits have paraded several theories to explain the election outcomes. Some contended that the election of the Kenyatta and Ruto was a Kenyan rebellion to the West, considering that they are indictees of the International Criminal Court, ICC at The Hague, Netherlands. Other theories, like Mutahi Ngunyi’s “Tyranny of Numbers,” would earn condemnation and admiration in equal measures. It is embarrassing to admit that Kenyans vote along ethnic lines. My take is different. 

Effective employment of public relations. 

Kenyatta and Ruto's win of the elections is largely attributable to their effective employment of public relations. Without insinuating that their competitors flopped in their communication strategies, it is worth noting that strategic communication in the Jubilee Alliance played a monumental role. All through the campaign period, Jubilee Alliance mounted magnanimous public relations campaigns. But what is public relations?

Public relations entails communication campaigns that promote favorable perceptions of the communicator by the target audience. In the words of Harold Burson, a public relations guru and co-founder of Burson-Marsteller, one of the largest public relations agencies in the world, public relations is a protracted effort that is supposed to “employ communication strategies and tactics to motivate audiences to a specific course of action.” With this hindsight, everybody would be excused to charge that all politicians and alliances in the elections relied on public relations. An understanding of the roles of public relations would stimulate a reexamination of this standpoint fueled by naivety.   

Key amongst the roles of public relations is to sense changes in the society and reflect on these changes in communication. To understand what is happening in the society, one has to be in touch with the people. Today, the clamor against imperialism and neo-colonialism  is louder than it has ever been in the Third World countries. Perhaps this informed the anti-West rhetoric characterizing Kenyatta’s campaigns. Besides, Jubilee's campaign was outrightly alined toward the youth. That a sizeable population of youths in Kenya, and indeed the rest of the world are successfully leading in the corporate arena is indicative of a trend where this population would not hesitate to assume political leadership. This is something that did not escape the attention of the Jubilee Alliance.

By branding himself “Hustler,” a common attribute referring mainly to a youth struggling to make ends meet, Ruto could have endeared himself amongst the youthful voting constituency. Narratives of Ruto’s humble beginnings as a roadside hawker, perhaps made many youths identify with him. Who would believe that Ruto, in his social stature then, would partake in a meal of ugali and fish in a dingy kibanda in Nairobi’s terror-prone Eastleigh with ordinary folk? 

The rationale behind the gesture is that many youths in Kenya go through this lifestyle on a day-to-day basis. Consistent passing of these gestures in the campaigns certainly succeeded in enticing the populace. This hints on another important role of public relations: communication.

Public relations is about communication, effective communication for that matter. This is passing messages across in a truthful manner, to facilitate the articulation of critical issues.The outcome of effective communication is not only to persuade the audience but also to nurture trust.The Jubilee Alliance reiterated its commitment to the plight of the business community, farmers, the youth and women throughout the campaign period. Anybody could tell that Kenyatta and Ruto knew which audiences to target with what messages, so that they promised affordable fertilizer while in Eldoret and erecting fish processing plants while in Kisumu. 

That Kenyatta and Ruto have been effective users of social media is not debatable. The combination of their Twitter followers has consistently outnumbered that for any other politicians. By the time I am writing this, Kenyatta’s official Twitter handle, @ UKenyatta has 156, 146 followers and the number of tweets has hit the 1634th mark.That of Ruto, @WilliamsRuto has clocked 42,982 followers. They recognized that the new media was a great way of reaching to millions of middle class voters and opinion leaders, at home and in the diaspora. Then came the Presidential Debates.

Kenyatta must have realized that the Presidential Debates were great forums for stating his cause. This explains his demeanor during the events. Besides tackling questions head on, he managed to wrestle one of the “elephants in the house”, in the words of NTV’s Linus Kaikai, one of the moderators. In a display of compos mentis, Kenyatta reiterated that the ICC case before him was just a personal challenge, more or less like the challenges facing each of the seven presidential candidates with him at the Brooke House School event. Analysts could not have gone wrong when they unanimously rated him as the greatest beneficiary of the presidential debates. 

Non-verbal cues in public relations are critical in passing critical messages. This is one of the many areas where Kenyatta and Ruto outshone their competitors. Conspicuously, the two traveled travel together, oftentimes in the same car, to all their campaign rallies. Nobody could miss noticing the hugging, and hearty smiles exhibited by the duo in public rallies. These gestures radiated warmth, sincerity, and, importantly, dispelled any fears that the Kenyatta-Ruto alliance was a union of convenience. They used the acceptability developing from the effective communication to their advantage.
 

Throughout the campaign period, Kenyatta and Ruto ensured that they were responsive to contemporary public issues. Their manifesto is vocal on issues touching on public health and education. Here, there was need to articulate on the issues that reflect on the expectations of the electorates while at the same time beaming in feasibility. Sustainability is an important tenet of public relations. All this flourished in any environment in which the duo behaved in utmost decorum. This entailed exercising restraint from resulting to vulgar language even when the provocation from opponents warranted for nothing less. This deliberate cultivation of conscience, still, is amongst the important roles of public relations.
 

When, therefore, Cynthia Nyamai owned that she was amongst various public relations heavy weights, including Big Ted, a popular urban MC, and a swarm of British public relations firms, working behind the triumph of Kenyatta and Ruto, to me, it was not surprising. Mounting serious public relations campaigns culminated in turning around the perception of the electorate on the duo. Consistency in these campaigns worked miracles for the electorates who had some misgivings about the suitability of the duo. Eventually, they took the day in the hotly contested elections.
 

So what?
 

Public relations is not an end in itself. Following their declaration as the winners of the March 4^th elections, Kenyatta and Ruto are reaffirming that effective communication should translate to better service delivery. Those who were keenly following the speeches by the duo during the inauguration ceremony must have recognized as I did that Kenya is in safe hands. The reiteration of their commitment to upholding the devolution agenda and fulfilling the promises in the manifesto is reassuring enough. Clearly, there is every reason for Kenyans to trust in President Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta.