Dirty Kenyan Politics Part 3: Nominations

As Ferdinand Waititu secures TNA nomination for governor

Read Part 1 of this article
Read Part 2 of this article

The most surprising thing about the nomination chaos witnessed countrywide is that it has caught many Kenyans unawares.

But why should it when the country has been neatly divided into tribal zones where winning the nomination of the tribe’s political party is an automatic pass to the desired seat? That means that candidates will do anything, and I mean ANYTHING, to get the party nomination. Indeed in many instances the budget for the nominations is much higher than what will be spent on the actual election.

Dirty tricks are much easier to use during nominations because the political parties cannot be as stringent organized and professional as the national electoral body, the IEBC. Is it not much easier to bribe some party official overseeing some nomination process? In any case has anybody carefully examined the real motive for most in taking up the responsibility of being a returning officer for their political party? Let me spell it out for you; personal fundraising. And it is fundraising for big projects like buying a shamba. And fortunately for those with these kinds of motives the 2013 elections are a goldmine.

Remember that we have more elective posts than we have ever had before. And the posts people are going for are pretty powerful. Being an MP is nothing. A governor for instance has more power than the president and will be a true boss in a county. Even senators will have much more clout than members of the national assembly. However most Kenyans at the grassroots level are still to come to terms with these new realities and so to them an MP is still a very important person indeed.

When you take all these facts into consideration then the only conclusion is that the nominations that we have just witnessed went pretty well.

Headquarters of rigging
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Most people are unaware of the real politics behind these nominations. Admittedly when a party is popular in a certain region rivals will always try to disrupt things by planting their own less popular candidate and looking for a way for them to win. In other instances they will allow their “planted” candidate to go through on the ticket of the popular party thus having their man or woman on the inside of the rival party for the purposes of passing on information and even voting in their favour when crucial bills come up for a vote.

For this reason party big wigs usually sit in Nairobi carefully monitoring the results coming in from all over the country and where for some reason they doubt the winner (or don’t like them), all they have to do is place a call and strange things start happening on the ground.

Politics can hardly get any dirtier than that.

Waititu Bags TNA Nomination For Nairobi Governor

Just a few days after my much-maligned-Sonko-for-president post rogue MP Ferdinand Waititu has beaten Jimnah Mbaru for the TNA nomination for Nairobi governor.

What is interesting is that Mbaru beat Waititu in the latter’s own backyard of Embakasi. Clearly there is something that went very wrong there.


The bottom line is that Nairobians need to prepare themselves for governor Waititu, as mentioned in this blog many months ago, he is unbeatable.

All in all this is a sign of things to come and Kenyans should be prepared to see a class war clearly emerge in these elections.