One Signature Is How Campaign Money Goes Missing
A campaign should never be able to move money on one person's decision. Not because your treasurer is dishonest, but because a single signature leaves nothing to check and nobody to ask.
Two signatures is the cheapest control a campaign can install, and it takes one visit to the bank.
What a second signatory actually prevents
Three things, in descending order of how often they happen.
It prevents the honest mistake. A payment made twice, a figure typed with an extra zero, a supplier paid before the goods were counted. A second person who has to look before the money leaves catches most of that.
It prevents the argument nobody can settle. Campaigns end. When they end, somebody asks where a payment went, and if one person authorised it alone the only available answers are that person's memory and that person's reputation. Neither is evidence.
It prevents the deliberate act, which is the rarest of the three and the one everybody worries about first.
Who the second signatory should be
Somebody who is not spending the money.
The campaign manager's job is to convert money into activity. The treasurer's job is to slow that down far enough to record it. Putting both signatures inside the same job removes the point of having two. Related: what the treasurer role is for.
Pick a second signatory who is reachable. A respected figure who travels for weeks at a time becomes the reason payments get made outside the system, and the workaround will outlive the trip.
Avoid appointing somebody who is also seeking nomination, supplying the campaign, or living in the same household as the person who does the buying. None of that implies dishonesty. It means that if a question is ever asked, the answer has to begin with an explanation.
Approval limits, written down before you need them
Two signatures on everything is not workable at ward level, where a coordinator may need to move a small amount on a Saturday.
So write a threshold. Below it, one named person can spend and claim, and the claim is submitted within a set number of days. Above it, the payment needs approval before it happens rather than after.
Set the threshold to fit your campaign, put it on one page, and give the page to everybody who handles money. The figure matters less than the fact that everybody knows what it is.
Review it once. A threshold set when the campaign was three people becomes an obstruction when it is thirty, and an obstruction is what teaches people to route around the rule. Raise it deliberately, in writing, rather than letting it erode through exceptions nobody recorded.
The gap a two-signature rule does not close
A phone is a single signature.
The bank mandate covers the bank account. It does not cover the mobile money line that most Kenyan campaigns actually run on, and that is where the volume is. Whoever holds that handset can move money alone.
The answer is not to pretend mobile money will not be used. It is to treat the handset as a controlled asset: a line held in the campaign's name rather than the candidate's personal number, a named custodian, payment runs at fixed times rather than continuously, and a reconciliation against the statement every week. Related: how to run mobile money so it survives an audit.
What to write into the mandate
Ask for the mandate to say four things.
Who the signatories are, by name and identification number. That any payment above your threshold requires two of them. Who may view the account without being able to move money, which should include the candidate even where the candidate is not a signatory. And what happens if a signatory becomes unavailable, so that one hospital admission in 2027 does not freeze the campaign.
Keep a copy of the mandate with the campaign records rather than only at the bank.
Do this before your next payment run
Open the mandate document and read it. If it names one person, change it. If it names two people who work in the same room and approve each other as a formality, change what they do rather than the paperwork.
If the account does not exist yet, that is the first job and it is not a 2027 job. Related: why the campaign account should exist now.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should a candidate be a signatory on the campaign account?
A candidate can be a signatory, but should never be the only one, and in practice a candidate on the road is a poor second pair of eyes. The more useful arrangement is a treasurer and one other person as signatories, with the candidate given full view access to the account. That way the candidate can see every movement without being the bottleneck that forces payments outside the system.
Does a two-signatory rule cover mobile money?
No. A bank mandate binds the bank account only, and whoever physically holds the campaign handset can move money on their own. The control that replaces it is a named custodian, a campaign-held line rather than a personal one, fixed payment runs, and a weekly reconciliation done by somebody who did not make the payments.