‘Nairobi politics is about money,’ Starehe MP Amos Mwago speaks on spending Ksh.50M in campaigns

How much would it cost to run a formidable campaign to become an elected leader in Nairobi? Depending on whom you ask, clearly, you would need to be financially loaded.

Starehe Member of Parliament (MP) Amos Mwago who was elected under the Jubilee Party ticket in the August 9th elections says he spent approximately Ksh.50 million to conduct successful campaigns that led him to victory.

This he says, was in addition to a lot of strategizing, branding and overall operations which also included giving tokens to his supporters to compel them to vote for him and attend his rallies.

“As Nairobi politics is concerned, it boils down to money because, in order to get an audience from people who are in their daily hustles, for them to leave what they are doing, to come to listen to you and they have to put bread in their table, you have to mobilise…and that is money,” he said during Citizen TV’s Day Break Show.

“Branding in Nairobi is very expensive, and buying campaign materials is very expensive. For Nairobi there is no two way about it, for a Member of Parliament, you have to spend approximately above Ksh. 50 million and way beyond depending on how early you started.”

He went on to reveal that holding conferences and running advertisements in the city requires a person who has deep pockets. He recalls having erected about 20 billboards in the county, which he said cost him about Ksh.10 million over a period of five months.

“You have to come up with strategies like the town hall meetings, which are very costly meetings because you have to do several of them,” he said.

“For me, I had more than 20 billboards in this town and you can imagine one costs Ksh.100,000 per to five months.”

Former Mathare MP aspirant Billian Ojiwa echoed Mwago’s sentiments intimating that he spent about Ksh.20 million in campaigns despite being floored by the incumbent Antony Oluoch.

According to Ojiwa, in the final month of campaigns, aspirants spent up to Ksh.100,000 in meetings every day, which amounts to about Ksh.3 million in one month. 

“I was not able to afford the 50 million, but no more than Ksh.20 million. In the last one month of our campaigns, we would use not less than Ksh.100,000 per day for the meetings; almost every day apart from Sundays when you go to church,” he stated.

Siyad Osman, a former MCA aspirant for CBD on his part reiterated that it is almost close to impossible to enter the political arena without financial capacity since voters would always want you to offer something.

“The person who is hungry today is hungry tomorrow, and let us be honest. Politics is money, it is resources. you cannot just say ati napendwa na wananchi, ni wananchu wamenichagua,” he noted.