Sabina: Behind the charm is a fighter

If you go on YouTube and watch the song Njata Yakwa by musician John De’Mathew, you will spy a familiar face. You might not believe it, but if you take a closer look, you will realise it is indeed true – the leading lady featured in the music video is Sabina Chege, the Murang’a Women Representative.

Many of the people who discover the video think she was merely a vixen in it, but she actually wrote the script for and produced what would be one of the first videos produced for a Kikuyu song.

“I decided to be in it to show people what the video should look like, since I was the producer,” she says. “And then of course after that people started rumours about it.”

“That you were De’Mathew’s girlfriend?” I ask.

“Yes,” she responds, laughing. “I really wasn’t!”

Being on TV

That’s not all. If you were old enough to have had the privilege of watching one of Kenya’s most acclaimed shows, Tausi, you might also remember her as Mzee Kasri’s daughter, Rehema. “Rehema was the good one. Rukia, the crazy one,” she clarifies. Her fondest memory from being on the show was getting to see herself on television for the first time. “I told my brother that I was going to be on TV and he said that I was crazy. What would I be doing on TV? But then when Tausi came on, we all huddled around the TV to see me on it. We were so excited! I will never forget that feeling,” she says.

The irony is that she is now on TV most of the time. She has run the full gamut of careers, from being a househelp, an assistant in a shop, a teacher, acting at the Kenya National Theater, being on Tausi, being a radio personality and now a politician.

We are at the Intercontinental Hotel. She is dressed in an ankle-length blue dress with small white prints on it, beneath a long, black, knee-length cardigan. “I have to dress like this when I am going to a funeral because they call me ‘maitu’ (mother),” she says. True to her word, later on, a guest at the hotel calls out to her as we leave,’ Maitu wa county!” he says.

A woman in politics

She is popular and busy. Her phone keeps ringing and she barely has time to squeeze in our interview after a 7am breakfast event where she has just been given an award for Championing NGOs Engagement in HIV Response in Kenya. She has a meeting after our interview, after which she has to rush to Kandara for a funeral.

Sabina Chege is so warm in person that I forget a few times that I am talking to a popular politician.

She has the gift of gab and can easily get a laugh out of you. For instance, she tells me that the one person she would like to meet, if he had still been alive, is Nelson Mandela – but not for the reason you think. Sure, the amazing life he led would definitely be part of it but the question she would really like to ask him is, “Why would you divorce the woman who stood with you through everything that you went through?” She is incredulous while saying it. “And then he married another president’s wife! He was a revolutionary but also human. I would really like to ask him that question. Seriously. Petition for Winnie!” Being a woman in politics is an uphill task. “The public judges you very harshly, people use your name to con other people – it’s ridiculous. It is okay if people do not like you but do not write things online that are not true,” she says. “I live with my ailing father and he sees these things and asks me about them. When those things happen, I have learned to discuss them with my children, so they know the truth.”

In touch with her emotions

When she recently cried in public, she says the story was spun to make it seem that she was crying because she was booed, but she says it was really because she was moved by the generosity shown to her people.

She is a very emotional person. At a visit to Baby Pendo’s home, she was overcome with tears, as Pendo’s mother narrated the story of how her daughter got shot. “I don’t care which political side you support,” she says pensively. “No child deserves to die like that.”

It was hard for her to live just through the narration, but nothing comes close to the death of her mother in October 2017. It was just after the elections, and her parents were driving when they had a car accident. Her mother died, but her father, who was the one driving, was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). “We could not bury her until my father came out of the ICU two months later. She had to stay in the morgue all that time, and then when my father recovered, you can imagine having to break the news to him that our mother had died.”

It was the most difficult moment of her life, but also the most defining one. “I learned the true nature of people. That was when I learned who my true friends were,” she says.

Nurturing mother

As emotional as she is, she is also nurturing in equal measure, and it makes total sense to me that her favourite moment is when she is with her three children laughing and having fun. “My son has a laugh that just makes my day,” she says.

She is married, but won’t speak much about her family. She protects them from the limelight and only reveals that one of her life-changing moments was when she gave birth to her first born child when she was very young, in university. “Life stopped being about me then,” she says. Her children are aged 20, 11 and 4 – two girls and a boy.

In her experience, though, marriage succeeds if you marry your friend. “It is about understanding. Forget about the money and all that. If you are friends, you will understand each other and work through issues amicably. And it is important to be there for your children. The reason they come back when they grow up depends on the time you gave them when they were young. Not doing that is one of the reasons we have people struggling with issues like mental illness and alcoholism,” she says.

She pays school fees for more than 400 students, a venture she began before she ever considered politics, through her Sabina Wanjiru Foundation.

Biggest influence in her life

Her own mother, who she describes as strong and no nonsense, was the biggest influence in her life. “I am the last born of nine children but I am not spoilt, because of her. I behave like a first born. She was the one who taught me charity,” she says.

Charitable people always tug at her heartstrings, as the other biggest influence in her life was Mother Theresa. “She left her comfort zone to go serve a community no one would have wanted to be in, and it was for nothing in return. She was so selfless.”

She hopes to make a real difference in the country, at whichever level, “even at the highest office or representing the country in another capacity,” she says.