Kirinyaga Governor Anne Waiguru
Kirinyaga governor urges the region’s voters to prioritise development records over political affiliation ahead of the 2027 General Election — and signals her own ambition for the deputy presidency
By Yvonne Wambui
Kirinyaga Governor Anne Waiguru yesterday cautioned residents of the Mt Kenya region against allowing political party popularity to drive their voting decisions in the 2027 General Election, urging them instead to examine the individual performance, development records, and accountability of every candidate seeking their vote.
Waiguru made the remarks on Thursday while addressing residents of Kianyaga in Gichugu Constituency, Kirinyaga County, after inspecting the ongoing Kianyaga Level Four Hospital project — a visit that combined a tangible display of county delivery with an unmistakable political message aimed squarely at the region’s millions of registered voters.
“Do not vote for a candidate simply because they belong to a popular political party,” Waiguru told the gathering. “Ask what they have done. Ask what they plan to do. Ask whether they can be held accountable.” Her warning was direct: the wave of enthusiasm that surrounds a political party at any given moment can carry candidates into office without development agendas, without delivery records, and without the competence to address the real challenges facing ordinary Kenyans. The region, she argued, was too important — and its needs too pressing — to be decided by party affiliation alone.
The caution carries particular weight in the Mt Kenya context. The region has long been the most scrutinised voting bloc in Kenyan national politics, its millions of ballots capable of tilting a presidential race and defining coalition arithmetic for years. Ahead of August 2027, competing political formations are already investing heavily in winning its loyalty, with some pushing for continued alignment with President William Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza administration and others — including former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua’s Democracy for the Citizens Party — making an aggressive case for a full break. Against that noise, Waiguru’s call for voters to tune out party signals and tune into individual performance is both a substantive argument and a timely political intervention.
It is also, unmistakably, a self-serving one — and there is nothing wrong with that. Waiguru used the Kianyaga gathering to make clear she is not planning to step back from public life when her gubernatorial term ends. She is planning to step up. The governor indicated she is ready for greater national leadership responsibilities and appealed to residents to back her ambition for the deputy presidency in the 2027 General Election. “My experience in county leadership has prepared me for a bigger role in national governance,” she said, pointing to the development projects her administration has undertaken in Kirinyaga. The Kianyaga Level Four Hospital, whose construction she inspected on Thursday, is precisely the kind of tangible evidence she wants voters to weigh — infrastructure that exists, not promises that have yet to be tested.
Waiguru was accompanied during the hospital inspection by Nyeri Women Representative Rahab Mukami and other local leaders. Mukami voiced support for the governor’s national ambitions, citing her administrative experience and track record in county development as qualifications for a senior role in the next government. Mukami also raised a concern that is never far from conversations about Mt Kenya’s future: the proliferating problem of illicit alcohol and second-generation brews, which she described as a deepening threat to families and the region’s youth. “We need leaders who can prioritise the welfare of citizens,” Mukami said, framing the issue not merely as a public health crisis but as a test of the kind of leadership the region elects.
That framing resonates. Kenya is a country where most people carry more than one identity — professional, farmer, parent, community member — and the leaders they choose shape the conditions across all of them. In Mt Kenya, as in every region, the cost of electing a poor leader is paid not just at the ballot box but in every clinic that lacks medicine, every road that remains unbuilt, every young person whose future narrows because the person sent to represent them had a party card but no plan.
Waiguru’s argument is essentially that voters should insist on more. She is asking her audience to apply to every candidate the same scrutiny she is implicitly inviting them to apply to herself: look at what was built, what was delivered, what can be verified. It is a high standard to set in the middle of a campaign season that will grow louder and more tribal in its appeals as August 2027 approaches. But it is the right one.
The broader political picture across Mt Kenya remains fluid. The region is navigating a complicated recalibration following Gachagua’s impeachment, with various leaders jostling to fill the political space he once occupied and new alliances forming and dissolving in rapid succession. Waiguru, by positioning herself as a voice of development-focused pragmatism rather than partisan loyalty, is carving out a distinct identity in that landscape — one that could prove attractive to voters exhausted by the intensity of factional politics and simply wanting to see their hospitals built and their roads tarmacked.
Whether her message cuts through will depend, in large part, on whether the Kianyaga Level Four Hospital and the other projects she points to are completed, functional, and visible to voters when they walk into polling stations next August. In Kenyan politics, nothing makes the argument for a candidate better than a finished building that works.
For now, Waiguru has drawn her line clearly: judge leaders by what they do, not by who they stand with. It is advice that the Mt Kenya electorate — and perhaps the broader Kenyan public — would do well to take seriously, wherever the political winds blow between today and election day.
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