When you look at the numbers from the Mbeere North campaign, it becomes clear that Gachagua may not be as powerful as people think.
Newton Karish had a very big and organized team. Each polling station had 40 mobilizers — 20 going to pick voters from their homes and 20 staying at the station. He also had 25 security people and 2 agents at every station.
Since Mbeere North has 134 polling stations, Karish ended up with 8,978 people working on the ground, plus 22 people at the tallying centre. In total, he had about 9,000 workers.
Karish got 15,308 votes. If you compare this with his big team, you can say around 6,308 votes is what they got from the ordinary voters who were not part of his team.
Meanwhile, Gachagua stayed in Mbeere for 10 days, waking up at 5:00 a.m., doing morning walks, milking residents cows, drinking tea and campaigning for about 10 hours every day. Gachagua received KSh 60 million for this work.
If you divide that money by the votes he helped bring in — about 6,300 votes — it means he spent around KSh 10,000 for every vote he delivered.
On the other hand, if Karish had been given the same money, he would have used only around KSh 6 million to get the same number of votes, because his team was more effective.
When you compare everything, it looks like Gachagua’s influence might be overstated, because the results he delivered do not match the amount of effort and money used.
