Kenya: What if Obama’s Sh37 billion campaign money was spent here?

If opinion polls are to be believed, barring a disaster in the next two weeks, then Democratic Party presidential candidate Obama will be the country’s next president. Obama, whose father was a Kenyan student in America, has had a stunning performance in the campaign because he has put together the most organised and disciplined political organisation in recent US history, is charismatic, politically astute, and a very adept orator.

But America being America, Mr Obama has done something else that has made all the difference – his fund raising abilities have become legend. He has raised more cash than any candidate in recent US presidential campaign history, thanks to an awesome internet-driven fundraising machine.

Going by figures from September, Mr Obama has been beating his Republican opponent, Mr John McCain, with a money raising 2:1 ratio for much of the campaign period. And with a healthy campaign war chest, he has spent big. By August, Mr Obama had attracted more than $450 million in funding, according to the Los Angeles Times, against Mr McCain’s $210 million. The same newspaper estimated that Mr Obama’s figure in that respect will have exceeded US$500 million by election day. This is no mean amount by any rating.

Translated into Kenyan currency, it works out to about Sh37 billion (at Sh74 to the dollar). Imagine for a moment that Mr Obama was raising this money for his campaign, but had it to spend on his father’s motherland, what would it buy?

Well, it is enough to take care of all the expenses of the entire (recurrent and development spending) of the Kenyan Health ministry in the present financial year. And there would still be some Sh4 billion change.

According to statistician Mungai Kihanya, Sh37 billion could alternatively build 10 five-star hotels in the same league as Laico Regency (formerly Grand Regency).

The money could also fund more than half the budget of our Ministry of Roads, or, as Kihanya says, “foot all the expenditures of the Ministry of Education for a whole school term.”

Using Mr Kihanya’s estimate that it takes about Sh20 million to build a kilometre of road in Kenya, Sh37 billion is enough to construct a dual carriage from Mombasa to Kisumu, and there will still be some Sh3 billion left over to finance the government’s Sh2.9 billion roads budget for Nyanza Province.

By political comparison, if Mr Obama were a politician in Kenya and he had raised a similar amount of money for campaigns, he would have outspent ODM, PNU, and ODM-Kenya parties many times over.

Between September 28 and October 4, according to the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project which monitors political advertisements, the Obama campaign spent about $17.5 million (about Sh1.2 bilion) on TV ads.

This is equivalent to about Sh1.3 billion spent on TV ads for one week. The amount makes peanut of the approximately Sh200 million combined expenditure by ODM, PNU and ODM-K in total TV advertising during the entire last year’s election campaign season. And we thought the local parties had last year spent astronomical amounts of money in advertising! Even by US standards, the expenditures in political TV advertising are record breaking.

When Obama first announced his interest in the US presidency, his political opponents dismissed him as a nonentity, especially in terms of the necessary financial might that always went with people projecting such aspirations. But he seemed to have had something up his sleeve.

Backed by very many small contributors who were mobilised and galvanised through the internet and a wide range of new technologies (his ads are currently running in DVD games, a first), a few big financial supporters, Mr Obama was able to run a robust enough campaign during the primaries to clinch the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

In a June article in The Atlantic senior editor Joshua Green puts into perspective how the Democratic presidential candidate has deployed creativity in technology to his advantage.

He reports: “To get a better sense of why it has succeeded, I opted to undergo the full tech immersion while reporting this piece, and soon had Obama ring tones on my phone, new networks of online ‘friends’, text-message updates from the campaign, and regular e-mails from its manager, all gently encouraging me to give money, volunteer time, bring in new friends, and generally reorient my life in ways that were made to seem hip and fun — and inexorably aimed at the greater glory of Barack Obama.”
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API/Source.The Nation (Kenya) – October 20, 2008.