Wambui win proves doubters wrong

By Wainaina ndungu

Stubborn defiance and free spending for Mary Wambui Munene helped her to clinch the Othaya parliamentary seat even as the First Family sought to stop her win. According to sources close to her, she went into full time campaign mode after turning down an offer by an emissary of the First Family that she keeps out of the race. An Othaya politician said Ms Wambui was an angry, jilted woman out to make a point.

And she did. After meeting the businesswoman, the emissary is said to have gone back to his senders without an answer and left Wambui feeling highly slighted.

“She would have liked a situation where those against her bid went directly to her. She went full stream into the campaigns because she felt a person not of her age had been sent to her,” said a source close to her Othaya campaign team. It appears the prominent businessmen and professionals from Othaya opposed Wambui’s candidature. After a meeting at Nyeri’s Outspan Hotel around September, last year, the group meeting under the aegis of the Othaya Development Association (ODA) resolved to support their chairman Gichuki Mugambi.

The hand of the First Family was apparent in that meeting. One of those in attendance was Ms Judy Kibaki, the president’s eldest child and only daughter; a graceful lady who rarely makes pronouncements in public. Judy’s presence was linked to her chairmanship of the Othaya Girls Secondary Board of Governors. Hitherto, relatively unknown even by journalists in Nyeri, Mr Mugambi’s stature quickly rose from that day after he ventured to tell journalists that he had been approved by the Othaya professionals and traders to succeed President Kibaki.

Kibaki has represented Othaya since 1974 when he migrated his political base from Donholm Constituency in Nairobi after a particularly intense scare in the 1969 General Elections from one Mrs Jael Mbogo.  “For 39 years, the people of Othaya never experienced a real election campaign. We heard about the money in Mathira and elsewhere, but never came to touch it,” Mr Patrick Karonji, an Othaya boda boda operator said in the last week of the campaigns.

Daily Spending

According to Karonji, the largess distributed by the leading candidates in the parliamentary race were tidy amounts besides occasional contracts to serve as outriders in campaign convoys that fetched up to Sh1,000 per bike per day, including fueling.

A campaign manager of one of the three leading candidates – Wambui, Mugambi and city lawyer Peter Gichuki Kingara – estimated the daily spending of the three at between Sh3million to Sh5 million especially during the official 21 day campaign season. Another source says the three leading candidates could have pumped up to Sh75 million in the Othaya campaigns in the last weeks to the election.

Ms Charity Wandia, a fruit vendor in one of the markets in Othaya, puts her final tally of money offered by the candidates at about Sh3,000. That would mean she earned about Sh1,000 from the candidates in a week. According to the campaign manager embedded to one of the candidates whom we spoke to, Mugambi spent less than King’ara and Wambui and probably the least amount of personal fortune among the seven aspirants vying for the seat.

That is because while Wambui and King’ara largely self funded their campaigns, Mugambi had several financiers, including prominent businessmen in the ODA who would have given anything to block Wambui from capturing the seat.

Mr Essau Kioni, a former Kibaki aide, said Kibaki’s and his family’s help to Mugambi only helped Wambui garner sympathy votes, eating into the support base of other candidates such as he who hailed from Mahiga location with her. “My own supporters openly told me a rebellion over the treatment of Wambui would cost me votes. It was their (Mahiga) daughter who was being put under the grinder and they had to rescue her,” said Kioni.

A prominent Nairobi hotelier who generously chipped in Mugambi’s campaign kitty said the image of the dismally educated businesswoman as the successor of the Makerere and London School of Economics trained Kibaki in a generally prosperous constituency was a blot that could not be tolerated by any right thinking elite from the area.

Yet, he admitted it was hard selling Mugambi in the short six months after he was prompted to run while Wambui knew the constituency through and through, having been the president’s eyes in the grassroots since 1974. “She knew all the grey areas and she does not play clean,” said another businessman in Mugambi’s corner.

Then there was the problem of King’ara who has been on the ground in a well-oiled campaign spanning three years. Whichever way, King’ara was going to spoil Mugambi’s party because the two are not only from Chinga Location but also from the same village. However, Mugambi’s strategists still believed he would triumph in Karima, Chinga, and Iriani Locations while Wambui would probably beat him in Mahiga where she hailed from. But Wambui surprised them in The National Alliance (TNA) primaries when she won in all locations and a 3,000-vote margin of 13,050 to 10,080 votes for Mugambi.

Highly suspect

An impartial observer however says the credibility of the TNA primaries in Othaya was highly suspect and Mugambi was right to petition them.

He says underhand tricks, open bribery and plain outright influencing of the polling officials was the hallmark of the exercise. So why didn’t the ODA bolster King’ara who had already done some good groundwork rather than settle on breaking virgin ground that was Mugambi? An ODA source said although Kibaki’s son Jimmy Kibaki and the lawyer are seen as friends of sorts, the First Family has their misgivings on him. One of them is that King’ara had stubbornly vowed to push on with his bid and had too much dalliance with multiple political parties while the preferable situation was that a candidate be found to run on TNA.

Secondly was his remarks at the start of his long running battle for the seat in which he was seen as having antagonised the Kibaki family. Then also he has not been  a member of the ODA. At the end of the day, even Mugambi’s dream to run on a TNA ticket was frustrated by Wambui and he had to settle on Saba Saba Asili.

That did not prevent Kibaki from campaigning for him albeit while inspecting development projects and amidst one public humiliation for the TNA candidate when presidential guards physically blocked her from joining a presidential tour. At the end of it all, Wambui garnered 16,285 votes against King’ara’s 14,218, and Mugambi‘s 10,972 votes.