Why recent by-election losers with integrity outshine tainted winners

In a season where money and criminality have begun to overshadow popularity, Kenya has entered an era where winning no longer automatically signals legitimacy. The recent by-elections made this painfully clear. Violence travelled ahead of victory, and money became the real campaigner. Power went to those willing to pay for chaos, not those who persuaded the conscience of the people. When blood becomes part of an electoral process, celebration becomes a form of moral blindness.

A win is not just a win. How you win matters. Suluhuism describes the politics of winning by suppression—an artform in which power is acquired by pressing down the will of the people and paying to obstruct their voice. It is a system where oppression is packaged as electoral success, where violence is renamed “mobilisation,” and where bloodshed becomes part of the campaign budget. In Suluhuism, strategy is simply the sanitised name for force.

A Suluhuist feels nothing apart from the intoxication of power. The screams of citizens collapsing under the weight of heavy state boots are music to their ears. The blood that splashes from those crushed becomes colour for the regime’s canvas—an aesthetic of fear painted over the hopes of innocent people. In such politics, the win stands over the body of a broken democracy, smiling as if nothing has died.

To boast where blood has been shed is to reveal an indifference to innocence. When a regime no longer honours the innocent, its conscience is seared—burnt beyond recognition. And where conscience is burnt down, morality is quickly frowned upon. When morality—our basic sense of right and wrong—is mocked, then evil begins to laugh at integrity. It mocks the idealists who still believe in fairness. 

In the recent by-elections, select Suluhuistic leaders camped in particular locations, yet their presence was marked not by ideas, but by imported chaos. When you see physical chaos, be sure there is another more vicious chaos working behind the scenes. And when peddlers of violence declare victory, look around.Somewhere, the men and women of peace have been silenced. Somewhere, the voice of reason has been pushed out by the clang of paid goonism. Somewhere, the will of the people has been bent, twisted, or broken altogether.

This is the national danger: when evil laughs without opposition. A society reaches its most perilous point not when wrongdoing exists, but when it goes unchallenged—when the voices of justice grow too weak to protest, too tired to resist, or too compromised to speak. Evil becomes bold when goodness becomes silent. 

When the prophets confronted kings in Israel, their concern was not just political corruption but the national decay that followed it. They spoke against those who turn justice into bitterness, those who call evil good, and lamented leaders who adorned their power with hypocrisy. The prophetic tradition insists that righteousness is not a decorative virtue—it is the foundation upon which national stability rests.

But in the very moment when criminality appears to triumph, something unexpected happens: losing begins to reveal its hidden wins. The Christian story itself is a testimony to the wins in losing. The cross looked like defeat, yet it was the place of the greatest moral victory. In a political culture where victory is increasingly purchased and protected by force, losing cleanly becomes an act of moral clarity. It is a declaration that one’s conscience is intact, that one refused to participate in the rot that now masquerades as strategy. 

The first win in losing is humility. Losing forces reflection. It strips away illusions and compels a leader to return to themselves, to their values, and to their mission. Loss silences the noise and amplifies the inner voice. Those who lose are released from the pressure of posturing as kingpins and are given the rare privilege of seeing others as valuable. Humbled by loss, their eyes open where they once could not see; their sight widens where it was narrow; and their view of others sharpens where it was blurry. Humbled by loss, the United Opposition should be strengthened to become truly united.

A second win is insight. Every political loss exposes what really happens behind the curtains. When one is defeated by criminality, one becomes a witness to the methods used. The violence, the bribery, the intimidation—these become visible not as rumours but as reality.

Losing provides a clear window into the moral condition of the country. It turns the loser into a recorder of truth, a custodian of the memory of what went wrong. The dishonest winner walks away with a seat; the clean loser walks away with sight.

A third win in losing is moral capital. In a society where conscience is slowly burning down and morality is often mocked, losing with integrity becomes a rare form of honour. The nation recognises that something unfair happened. A loss that preserves one’s soul is more valuable than a victory that destroys it. 

A final win in losing is credibility. A clean defeat builds trust. It tells the public that your values are worth more than your votes. It communicates that leadership, for you, is not a trophy but a calling. Credibility is the currency that remains long after the campaign posters have faded. Those who lose with integrity often become the moral reference points the nation returns to when the fog of criminalised politics finally lifts.

This is why, in an age where criminality is dressed as victory, losing honestly is not a failure—it is a form of prophetic resistance. It is the courage to stand on the side of truth even when truth does not win the tally. It is a way of insisting that the nation’s soul is still worth fighting for. There is more leadership in losing with clean hands than in winning with a bruised conscience. 

Those who lost are winners in waiting, shaped by humility, strengthened by insight and preserved by integrity. The country may not reward them immediately, but history has a long memory. It remembers character long after it forgets numbers. Losing cleanly positions a leader for the moment when the nation finally tires of counterfeit victories and turns back to the authentic. In such a time, those who once lost will rise—not as victims, but as the true winners after all.