What to Do About the Volunteer Everyone Has Started Avoiding

There is a person on your team that other people have started working around. Meetings are arranged so they are not there. A ward has quietly stopped reporting because reporting means dealing with them.

Nobody has said anything, because they are a volunteer, they are not paid, and confronting them feels ungrateful. So the campaign absorbs the cost, and the people absorbing it are the ones who do the most work.

The three problems people keep confusing

They need completely different responses, and treating them as one thing is why campaigns get this wrong.

A performance problem. They are not doing the work. Usually fixable, often not their fault, and never a discipline matter until you have checked the obvious causes.

A conduct problem. Money that cannot be accounted for, a promise of payment to a voter, aggression towards a resident or a colleague, threatening behaviour at an event. This is not a conversation about improvement.

A fit problem. They work hard, they mean well, and they are wrong for the role. A brilliant mobiliser who cannot keep records. A generous person who cannot stop promising things the campaign has not agreed to.

Most campaigns respond to all three with silence, then respond to all three at once with a sudden removal, which is the worst possible sequence.

Deal with conduct immediately, and separately

Conduct is not graded on effort or on how many people the person brings.

Bribery, treating and violence are criminal offences under the Election Offences Act 2016, and a party subscribes to an electoral code of conduct under the Elections Act 2011. Your campaign can be answerable for what people do in its name, and the fact that somebody was a volunteer rather than staff does not change how it will be reported.

So the rule is simple and has to be stated before anything happens: anything involving money, a promise of payment, or violence ends the person's role that day, in a conversation, with a written note of what happened and when. Not a quiet demotion, and never a transfer to another ward, which is how a problem is passed on rather than solved.

Write that rule down now, while nobody has broken it. A rule invented on the day of an incident always looks like a decision about the person.

Before you treat it as performance, check three things

Almost every performance problem in a Kenyan campaign turns out to be one of these, and none of them are the volunteer's fault.

Were they ever given a specific task? "Campaign in your ward" is not an instruction. Somebody who has never received a concrete ask has not underperformed.

Can they afford to do it? Transport, airtime and a day away from a business are real. A person too proud to say they cannot afford the matatu will simply stop coming, and will look uncommitted while doing so.

Has something changed at home? Illness, a bereavement, a job, a new baby. People do not volunteer this information and often need permission to step back for a season without it being treated as a resignation.

Ask those three before anything else. The measurement side of this is covered in what a ward coordinator should be measured on, and a coordinator with no volunteers is a recruitment problem rather than a performance one.

The conversation, and how to hold it

In private, in person where possible, by phone if not, and never in the group chat. A public correction creates a permanent enemy and teaches everybody else that the campaign humiliates people.

Describe the behaviour, not the character. What was agreed, what happened instead, and what needs to be different. Then stop talking and let them answer, because roughly half the time the answer changes the picture entirely.

End with one specific thing, one deadline, and a date to speak again. Then keep that date. A conversation with no follow-up teaches the person that the conversation was theatre.

Removing somebody without making an enemy

In a constituency campaign, the person you remove will still be in the ward on 10 August 2027, talking to the same neighbours. Removal is therefore a relationship decision as much as an operational one.

Do it in person, first, before anybody else hears. Give one honest reason rather than several soft ones, because soft reasons invite negotiation and then get repeated back in a distorted form. Thank them for something real and specific. Offer a smaller role if one genuinely exists and you would be glad to have them in it, and do not offer one if you would not.

Then tell the affected coordinator directly, and say nothing further in public. A campaign that announces removals is a campaign whose volunteers are all waiting to be announced about.

What to write down this week

Two pages. One is the short list of things that end a role immediately. The other is the three checks you run before calling anything a performance problem.

Circulate both to your coordinators now, in 2026, while the team is calm. The rule that everybody knew about in advance is the only rule that survives being applied to somebody popular. Related: where the line goes with paid staff.