If one were to summarise the forthcoming Kenya 2012 election to other East Africans who are watching the campaign hot up, perhaps the best one would be; “it is all Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s.”

Raila faced off with President Mwai Kibaki, who is stepping down in the next few months after serving out his second term and legally final term, in the 2007 elections. The election outcome ended in dispute, and Kenya was plunged into the worst bout of violence since independence.

When the violence eased off at the end of January 2008, at least 1,400 Kenyans were dead, nearly 600,000 were displaced, and over 5,000 had fled as refugees to eastern Uganda — the first time Kenya sent out, rather than received, such a larger number of refugees.

In the end, an internationally mediated agreement, led to a power-sharing agreement between Kibaki and Raila — the former remained president, and the latter became prime minister in a Grand Coalition government.

More recently, most of the respectable opinion polls taken in Kenya over the past four years have suggested that Raila will win the 2012 election. Thus the story every other fortnight with a new opinion is about; one, whether he is maintaining his lead; second, by how much he is rising or slipping up (and in the past year his numbers have been bleeding, although slowly); and who of his possible rivals — Deputy Prime Minister and Kanu leader Uhuru Kenya, NARC-Kenya leader, the feisty Martha Karua, former High Education minister and former Raila bossom ally-turned-arch adversary William Ruto, Internal Affairs Minister George Saitoti, Vice President and Wiper Democratic Movement party chief Kalonzo Musyoka, and lately Raila’s ODM party deputy and Deputy Prime Minister and Local Government Minister Musalia Mudavadi — will deny him victory.

After the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague found that Uhuru and Ruto, among four of the six Kenyans who were accused, had a case to answer for their alleged role in the 2008 post-election, their new-found G7 alliance was boosted by a sympathy wave. In Central Kenya, where many view Kenyatta as a hero who organised to save the Kikuyu from extermination during the post-election, he became a martyr to some, and his star soared.

So the view today is that if the alliance between Kenyatta and Ruto holds, then Raila can easily be beaten.

Wrong numbers

In many ways this is where Kenya was in 2007; few people, planned on the fact that the opinion polls were wrong.

This is not to say that there was no election cheating in 2007. Indeed most independent audits of the election found that there were irregularities. Rather, the fact that those who had banked on a clean Raila triumph, might have acted differently, if they had also prepared for the high possibility that he would lose.

This is where “scenario planning” or “scenario building” comes in.

Modern scenario planning is commonly traced to World War II, when the US Air Force would come up with various moves its opponents might make, and to prepare for them.

For this reason, scenario building is less about the things we are almost sure will happen or have a high chance of taking place, eg football clubs Manchester City or Manchester United winning this season’s Premier League.

It is about imagining how 10th placed Everton could pull off a surprise. In the recent Africa Cup of Nations, Zambia did not start off as a favourite.

Those who get their scenario right, often laugh all the way to the bank. The company that finally made scenario planning sexy was Royal Dutch/Shell. In 1970 the Club of Rome, a group of the world’s very clever people and politicians, went to the prestigious MIT University in the US, and asked them to predict the future of the world: MIT crunched the numbers and wrestled with tonnes of data, finally predicting that within 20 years (around 1990) the world would run out of oil.

Virtually all the oil companies in the world, and several big multinationals, made their future plan based on that — except Shell.

There was an eccentric French oil executive called Pierre Wack who was working in Shell’s London offices. Wack decided that rather than obsess with numbers, the best way to do scenarios was to embrace the possibility of surprises and reality of uncertainty, and try to imagine an unusual future that could be produced through a complex combination of the ordinary things we see today.

And that the best way to describe this future is not through numbers and charts, but through stories.

Scary stories

So he came up with several stories, including one that was close to that that MIT developed for the Club of Rome about oil running. However, he also came up with one in which the then very young and largely inconsequential Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cuts back supply of oil, causing world prices to skyrocket.

Wack told a scary story about what would happen to Shell in this scenario, scary enough to grab the attention of the company’s chiefs. Shell prepared for this scenario.

MIT’s scenario for the Club of Rome was wrong. Oil did not run out, and it still flowing aplenty 40 years later. Wack was right. In the Middle East crisis following the Arab-Israel war, OPEC squeezed supply, and world prices soared.

The result? By the time the dust settled, OPEC was oil king, and Shell had moved from a weak seventh position among the oil companies in the world then, to second in size, and number one in profitability! Thanks to Wack and what some thought was his outlandish scenario.

To avoid the mistakes of 2007 which cost Kenya dearly, and also shocked the economies that depend on Kenya as their export/important route, we have done a Wack.

While Raila, Kenyatta, and Ruto will be key players, and possibly one of them could be Kibaki’s successor, that is neither God-given or predestined by history.

Possibilities

Someone else can become president, and the three would be reduced to the sidelines. Indeed, in our scenario building, three people who are not “favourites” or in the top three in opinion polls have the most power in determining the next president of Kenya — Raila’s deputy Mudavadi, Martha Karua, and Water minister Charity Ngilu (who has not indicated that she will join the race for State House).

As it happens, because Uganda and Rwanda were badly burnt by the Kenya’s post-election violence of 2008, and their leaders — President Yoweri Museveni and President Paul Kagame — are both former guerrilla leaders and master military strategists who led their organisations to victory — the two men have, we are reliably informed, been working on their own Kenya scenarios.

So what else might be possible in the Kenya election?