By Dikembe Disembe
An opinion poll by a local website has tilted the stakes of Jubilee Nairobi County politics towards Devolution cabinet secretary Anne Waiguru, however polling experts have pointed out that majority of those who participated were ethinic Kikuyu who are not voters in Nairobi county and therefore senator Sonko leads the pack with valid votes.
The powerful cabinet member, seen as President Uhuru’s reserve pick for Nairobi (Senator Mike Sonko remains Uhuru’s favorite after political extinction of Ferdinad Waititu), has perceptively become a frontrunner in the gubernatorial race that she hasn’t even declared her interest in. So serious is Anne Waiguru’s potential stab at the heaviest funded county in Kenya that ‘super senator’ Mike Mbuvi Sonko has been forced to open up a call centre to start coordinating his ground game.
Sonko posted to social media sites Facebook and twitter photos of five ‘professional ladies’ whom he revealed will run the call centre for his ‘Sonko Rescue Team’, a confusing outfit embedded in the open space between Waiguru’s militia, NYS, and other unofficial pro-Uhuru gangs propping up in town every passing day, including the Paul Kobia led mercenaries – UBBU.
The team, whose current activities range from offering free ambulance services (though it is unknown whether there are members with health/medical background), free safe rides home to those drunk and can’t drive, free wedding limos and free estate security services.
In campaign politics, however, Sonko is setting up his campaign machine. And yes, the Nairobi senator has real supporters.
But, while Sonko is not a pushover, the entry of Anne Waiguru, a safer bet for Mt. Kenya moneybags than Sonko, has fundamentally complicated the equation. In fact, Waiguru’s entry has sent another TNA ‘suitor’, Bishop Margaret Wanjiru, who noisily decamped from ODM, to eternal oblivion. By any means, Wanjiru has become a fringe participant in Nairobi County post-Evans Kidero politics which, surprisingly, has also pushed the incumbent Kidero out.
Waiguru’s star, to those who religiously believe she is contesting the Nairobi seat come 2017, is even brighter. They can bet with their lives, so they say, that Waiguru stands the closest to becoming the first Deputy President, and, in post-Uhuru politics, the first female president from Mt. Kenya, of the Republic of Kenya.
To assume these zealots is to doubt the might of the house of Mumbi – both financial, intellectual and, it must be added, geopolitical strategy. This is where the political equation badly annihilates Sonko, a flamboyant musketeer with no financial or ethnic fixed abode, save for his blings, his current money, and his fast-fading .
That Nairobi is important to Mt. Kenya is an understatement. In fact, to Governor Kidero’s credit, he has downplayed the western kenya – central kenya tensions which come with political control of vast financial resources of any part of the country outside the western grid.
Going forward, the question is not if, but when, the chickens will get home to roost.
And while all the teams must get back to the drawing board for future political eventualities, the reality of the Nairobi County gubernatorial race is that, right now, it tilts towards Waiguru. Should she rise to the occasion, it will take a combined force of the ‘others’, Sonko included, to deny her a five year term as the mayoress of city politics, from where she may just shook the nation to its core – a future rais?
Dikembe Disembe is a political blogger and editor-at-large of  three news websites in Kenya.