The night Sakaja ‘took my place’: Margaret Wanjiru opens up on her toughest political blow

By  Dorcas Muga-Odumbe

Gender & Health Editor

NMG

What you need to know:

• After three failed attempts to reach the ballot, Margaret Wanjiru says 2027 will be different.
• The former Starehe MP is banking on her Nairobi roots, political experience and loyal voter base.

Bishop Margaret Wanjiru remembers a campaign stop in Mathare where she was standing on a raised platform, addressing a crowd, when her feet began sinking into the ground. She kept sinking until she had to stop mid-sentence. The crowd laughed and rushed to pull her out. Only then did someone explain what she had been standing on.

“They told me they wanted me to experience their life,” she said. “I asked what they meant, and they said, ‘What you are stepping on is our toilet.’”

She says the experience that afternoon led her to build toilets, water points and washing stations in Mathare (then part of Starehe Constituency) that residents still use today. She often tells the story when talking about her work, which spans close to two decades in both church and politics.

“I have never left politics,” she says, only pausing between election seasons, and this time, running under her own party, Kenya Moja Movement Party, she is making a fifth attempt at the Nairobi governorship.

Long before politics, there was the church, and it was there, she says, that she fought her hardest battle over being taken seriously as a woman. Being ordained at all was the issue, she says: churches were comfortable with women evangelising, since that work grows every congregation, not just their own, but reluctant to ordain a woman as a full minister with authority over a church.

In 1997, church leaders were still debating, on the day of her ordination, whether to ordain her a full reverend or hold her as evangelist instead, the lesser title more commonly given to women.

“My archbishop refused to back down. As he put it, she even has a bigger church than some of you; we are going to ordain her a reverend,” Wanjiru tells the Nation.

When she was later elevated to bishop, she faced similar resistance from other church leaders, but her archbishop ultimately pushed the appointment through. She sees a version of the same resistance in politics, where parties lean on women to mobilise and turn out voters, then sideline them once real power is being shared out.

“They bring a man, and they throw you out,” she says, adding that in her experience, women are harder to buy off and better at stretching limited resources to benefit a whole community.

A new Nairobi, on paper

It is that same conviction, that she has been underestimated and pushed aside once too often, that runs through the declaration speech she gave when she formally entered the 2027 race.

Under the banner A new Nairobi, a new Kenya, she invoked the tenure of the late Margaret Kenyatta as Nairobi's mayor as an example of what a clean, orderly city once looked like and pledged to seek “one transformative term” rather than commit upfront to two.

She listed her priorities as cleaning up garbage and restoring the environment, a consistent water supply, a 24-hour economy, fixing roads, markets, hospitals and schools, and better service delivery, especially at county health facilities. Asked why Nairobians should choose her over other contenders, she cites her roots in Nairobi, saying she has “no tribalism or religious discrimination” and is guided by her Christian faith.

She also makes an economic case for it, saying that Nairobi produces “almost 60 per cent” of Kenya's GDP. Official figures from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, however,  put the county's actual contribution at 27.4 per cent, still by far the largest of any county. Asked what her earlier stints in office taught her, she points to what she calls “greedy” and “jealous” leaders who take or destroy other people's property and insert themselves into every business sector.

She is more detailed on financing than on job creation.

“Corruption is rampant at City Hall,” she says, arguing that the county “will only heal financially once the money is properly collected and managed through clear systems”.

Her health plan follows the same logic: tying every patient to a digital record, an approach she credits to systems she observed in the United Kingdom and to a model used by Kiambu Governor Kimani Wamatangi.

Under that system, a mother’s antenatal visits, vaccinations and follow-up appointments would be tracked from pregnancy through a child’s early years, with the county covering the cost of routine clinics such as vaccinations and growth checks so that families are not turning up worried about the bill.

On the two-thirds gender rule, which courts have found the current national cabinet to be in breach of, she says she would go beyond the legal minimum if elected, citing some counties with women governors but still fall short of gender balance in their own leadership, as a caution against women in power failing to open doors for other women.

Politics of small things

Her first campaign, in 2007, taught her things that no manifesto covers. She was campaigning from a mkokoteni cart in Mathare, pulled by a group of men, when it became clear that heels and a skirt would not work. She changed into flat shoes and trousers and has campaigned that way ever since.

She learned something harder to shake off too: that once people fall in love with a candidate, they start to feel they own her. It is advice she still gives to women with no money and no name who want to run for office: forget the money first, build the relationship with voters, and the money will follow, not the other way round.

She recalls helping a candidate in Embu who could not afford the customary campaign gift of sugar, so the two settled on something cheaper that residents actually needed instead: salt. It worked, she says. She does similar small things elsewhere: sanitary pads and underwear for the teenage girls she mentors, books and pens for students.

Over the years she has also sheltered girls who were sexually abused, others who fled violent homes, and some who were pregnant or already mothers with nowhere else to go. She says her own experience makes this easier: she became pregnant at 17 and says that is part of why she can sit with these girls without judging them.

She also believes recovery is not just physical, and that the emotional side needs as much attention, sometimes more, a view she has carried into how she counsels these girls. Wanjiru does not hide being a single mother either. She expects it to be used against her in this campaign, and does not shy away from the subject, noting that she is far from the only Kenyan woman with that experience.

She also addresses an older controversy from her time as assistant minister for housing head-on. She was accused of irregularly allocating herself National Housing Corporation (NHC) property. She does not deny acquiring the property, noting that she bought it and paid for it, the way any ordinary Kenyan buying an NHC property would.

A harder record

In Wanjiru's telling, her career has been marked by service and repeated setbacks caused by political manoeuvring. This is her fifth attempt at the Nairobi governorship, and in the previous four, she never actually made it onto a ballot. She repeatedly blames it on what she calls "politics of deception". The clearest example, she says, came in 2022.

The office had closed for the day, she says, with no other name in the system besides hers for the gubernatorial position on the UDA ticket, only for Johnson Sakaja's name to appear there overnight. She was then directed to run for senator instead, a pattern she says repeated itself in an earlier bid on an ODM ticket. On both occasions, she says she garnered more than 500,000 votes despite losing, which she believes reflects a loyal voter base.

In a separate interview on NTV's Fixing the Nation, Wanjiru filled in more of that history. In 2017, she sought the Jubilee Party nomination against Mike Sonko and Peter Kenneth and lost it, despite having reportedly agreed with Sonko, beforehand, on how a governor-deputy arrangement between them would work. When Sonko was later impeached and a by-election beckoned, she prepared to run again, only for the by-election to be blocked in court.

That record is why she is contesting this time under her own party while remaining part of the united opposition coalition. Everything else, she said, can be negotiated: the deputy governorship and the other county seats. The governorship cannot. Her party's nominations, she insists, will be free and fair, and if the united opposition eventually settles on someone else for Nairobi, she is not standing down for them.

“Whether they give me the ticket or not, I will go all the way, because my voters are expecting it of me,” she said.

The TV conversation also touched on the demolition of Jesus Is Alive Ministries, the church she leads, and whether her renewed political ambitions would look the same had it not happened. She said her position has not changed. “It was a case of ‘strike the shepherd, scatter the sheep,’” she said, adding that she could not say for certain why anyone would want to destabilise her, since she and the sitting leadership rarely cross paths.

On whether a Nairobi governor can ever be truly independent, given how counties depend on national transfers, she argued that Nairobi's constitutional allocation is already sufficient to run the county and that the real problem is how that money is managed. She dismissed the idea that additional national funding, of the kind Governor Sakaja has negotiated for city projects, benefits ordinary Nairobians. “That is not truthful,” she said.

Her plans for tackling youth unemployment were less detailed. She put the number of young Nairobians without opportunities somewhere between 1.8 million and 2.2 million and talked about fixing it mostly in general terms: separating certified from uncertified but skilled workers, helping people already trained in trades like beauty therapy into existing businesses or their own, and building what she called a "digital market" to absorb young people into online work.

Turning the ideas into a plan that the county assembly could fund, however, would require consultation with residents once she is in office, she said. On this, she points to a track record from her own time in office.

As MP for Starehe, she introduced modern markets that she deliberately did not sell to occupants, choosing instead to lease them out with a little starter capital, a policy she sums up as “Mama hauzangi soko.” Some of those stalls, she tells the Nation, have since passed from the original traders to their children.

In her first year in office as governor, she wants to be judged on a visibly cleaner county and better water distribution, alongside laying the groundwork for pulling idle youth into work. Whatever the coalition negotiations produce in the months ahead, she is consistent on one point: her name, she says, will be on the 2027 gubernatorial ballot.