“We are all hypocrites here”: Patronage as predation in the “dirty game” of Kenya’s 2017 elections

In Kenya’s 2017 elections, politicians distributed cash hand-outs at campaign rallies and public gatherings in a bid to persuade voters to elect them. Rather than de-moralised transactions, anthropologists have sought to reframe such acts of apparent “vote-buying” as gift-giving whereby politicians and voters are conjoined in relations of moral and economic obligation. At the same time, these accounts often somewhat paradoxically note that such gifts fail to bind the loyalties of recipients at the ballot box. Extending recent insights from ethnographies of hunting and deception into the political realm, this article shows how in Kenya’s 2017 elections voters saw themselves not as recipients of gifts but as “hypocrites”, deliberately seducing politicians with performances of support to accrue cash handouts, then voting for whoever they pleased. But in the “dirty game” of the campaign season, Kenyans are also shown to sometimes fall prey to politicians' promises of change, only to be disappointed in the long run. The repetitive cycles of hope and despair leave Kenyan voters reflecting on such disappointment, the necessity of cash-hunting during election campaigns, and the pervasive feeling that they are living in a choiceless democracy.