The Four Roles a Constituency Campaign Cannot Do Without

Four jobs have to be done every single week in a constituency campaign, from the day you decide to run until the last form is signed on polling day in 2027. Most Kenyan campaigns hand out twenty titles and fill two of the four.

Titles are cheap. Coordinator, mobiliser, strategist, adviser, patron. They cost nothing, they buy goodwill, and they leave the actual work unowned.

The four roles you cannot skip

Somebody owns the field. One named person who can say how many households were visited last week, in which wards, by whom, without making a phone call first. Not the person who attends the most meetings.

Somebody owns the money. Every shilling in and out, recorded against a ward, an event or a person, on the day it moves. Campaign spending limits and reporting rules are set by the IEBC and gazetted before each election, and the return you eventually file is only as good as the records behind it. A campaign that starts reconstructing its spending in the final month does not finish.

Somebody owns the message. What the campaign says, who is allowed to say it, and what happens when something goes wrong at eleven at night. One voice, or you will spend the cycle correcting your own people in public.

Somebody owns polling day. Agents in every stream, forms, transport, food, and the chain of who calls whom when a presiding officer will not hand over a copy. This is the only one of the four whose work is invisible for a year and then settles the result in a single day.

Four names. In a small campaign, four people who also do other things. But four names, written down, each answerable for their own area without looking sideways at somebody else.

Why the candidate should hold none of them

The candidate has one job nobody else can do, which is to be in front of voters. Every hour spent approving transport money is an hour not spent at a funeral, a market or a church.

There is a second reason and it is the harder one. A candidate who runs the field operation cannot be told the truth about it. Coordinators do not tell a candidate that the candidate's own plan is failing. They tell a campaign manager, sometimes, if that manager has made it safe to say so.

The most common failure in Kenyan constituency campaigns is not a shortage of money. It is a candidate who is simultaneously the field director, the treasurer, the spokesman and the agent recruiter, and who therefore learns in August what was already true in March.

The overlaps that are safe, and the one that is not

You will not have four separate people at the start. Some doubling is fine.

Field and polling day can sit with one person for a while. Same skill, same map, and the agent list is built out of the volunteer list anyway. Split them once agent recruitment starts in earnest, which should be far earlier than most campaigns assume. Related: why agents are recruited a year out.

Message and field can be one person in a very small campaign, though it is uncomfortable, because the field is where you find out what the message ought to be.

Money cannot be combined with anything. It also cannot sit with a relative of the candidate who reports to nobody. Not because of suspicion, but because the person who spends and the person who records have to be two people, or the record is just an opinion. Every campaign that has ended in a public quarrel about money had one person doing both.

What a campaign with only two serious people does

Most people reading this have two, not four.

Write the four roles on one page anyway, put the two names against them, and mark plainly which jobs are currently unowned. An unowned job you can see is a recruitment target. An unowned job nobody has named is a hole you fall into in July 2027.

Fill them in this order. Money first, because it becomes unfixable fastest. Field second, because everything else is downstream of it. Polling day third. Message last, because in the early months the candidate can carry it.

How to write this down before Friday

One page, four headings. Under each heading: a name, a phone number, and the three things that person answers for.

Then a second page, which is what makes the first page real. What each of them reports, and when. A weekly number for field, a weekly balance for money, a weekly coverage count for polling day. Anything reported upward should be a number somebody is already expecting. The nerve centre piece sets out where those reports land and who reads them.

Then read both pages out loud to the two people who are already with you. If either of them cannot state what they are answerable for without hedging, you have not appointed them. You have only thanked them.

Once the four are named, the next argument is who runs each ward and on what terms. Related: appointing a ward coordinator.