Debt, credit and obligation in Kenya’s 2022 elections

Asked why they intended to vote for William Ruto in Kenya’s 2022 presidential election, many people in central Kenya had a simple answer: ‘we owe Ruto a debt’. This was not the only kind of debt, nor the only idea of obligation, to feature in the election campaigns: the extent of personal and national debt in Kenya were both frequently discussed. At the same time, voters were being offered more debt – through national and local schemes to provide credit to entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, even though the distribution of cash was an absolutely expected feature of campaign events, politicians and the public were consistently scathing in their denunciation of ‘handouts’: to simply give away money was widely viewed as deeply immoral. Drawing on traditional and digital media as well as interviews, this paper brings the literature on money debt in Africa into dialogue with work on electoral clientelism to explore how questions about the morality of obligations ran through the elections – in ways that suggest a degree of change but also point to deeper continuities.