Before he took power, the late President Mwai Kibaki once said of Maddo and his work: "...he actually appreciates the true meaning of a particular political or social situation, then he presents it to us in a humorous sense. So in many ways, he makes us understand ourselves better."
Maddo had been caricaturing him as leader of the Democratic Party, and he says that most politicians would decline to even comment about cartoonists, who they reviled.