I lost Sh6m in UDA nominations for Nyeri Town seat - Wanyaga Gathaka

For close to two years, Wanyaga Gathaka has been gearing up to run for the Nyeri Town parliamentary seat.

His efforts included popularising the UDA party in his constituency by setting up an office at his home along the Nyeri- Nairobi Highway at Gatitu village.

“I was keen to support the party by getting as many people registered in the party with the expectation that after I got to the nominations, these same people would be my voters,” he said

For two years, he employed clerks to recruit members into the party, an exercise in futility as the nominations relied on the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission register to conduct the primaries.

“I had been paying 10 clerks at least Sh500 daily each for close to two years and I spent close to Sh1m even before I started the actual campaigns for the nominations ticket,” he says.

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Gathaka then paid his registration fees to the party so he could fly party colours as a parliamentary candidate spending an additional Sh250,000.

“There were at least seven candidates who paid their fees to the party and yet after investing our funds, we came face to face with the shock of losing the tickets,” he said.

He also spent a tidy sum campaigning for the party nomination across the constituency.

Now Gathaka says the process was marred by corruption as he watched his hopes of being the Nyeri Town Constituency candidate vanish.

“One of the most shocking things was that all the clerks were employed by one candidate. This meant that they participated in ensuring the rigging took place,” he said.

Gathaka said in Riamukurwe polling station, the clerks would remove 20 blank ballot papers from the booklets only to tick their preferred candidates and stuff the ballot boxes.

For Gathaka to win, he says he would have had to spend up to Sh30,000 per polling station to distribute to agents and clerks who would then pay smaller amounts of about Sh300 per voter to secure their votes, this would have ensured he got at least 21,000 votes.

Dishing out such money, he says, would ensure that while some clerks were outside or taking breaks, the agents would then tick the hidden ballot papers and stuff the ballot boxes, for such favours, candidates have to pay a little extra.

This, he says, is what some of his rivals did.

But despite spending Sh6m in the run-up to the nominations he only got 3,000 votes.

“I wish the party had carried out consensus in all the constituencies instead of letting us spend our money and lose it. I would have preferred to give my money to a charitable organisation instead of wasting it,” he regrets.

He says by the nomination date, he had decided not to pay a single shilling to cut his losses after he observed the low turnout and favouritism that was taking place.

“Returning officers and clerks should have come from a different county so they cannot participate in the rigging of the nomination,” Gathaka says.

He said it was unfortunate that people contesting and losing in the nominations had been left penniless and unable to run their campaigns as independent candidates.

“We may have been nomination losers but we have decided to support the party so the Deputy President William Ruto can secure the seat and have enough elected leaders to rule government,” he says.

Gathaka, who is the chairperson of the Kenya Kwanza Campaign team in Nyeri, says he could not run independently despite the losses he suffered because he still believes in the party and what it stands for.

“Our real litmus test will be the August Polls. Despite what we experienced, I am still in politics to support our candidates in Nyeri County,” he said.