Since I joined DP William Ruto’s team and embarked on my Mombasa governor bid, many of my friends in and outside politics have asked me a question.
They want to know what I am doing in UDA, whereas I was associated with the Raila Odinga camp, and even rose up to be the secretary general of the Wiper party.
My answer is always quite simple. I believe it is high time some of us gave our top priority to the Coast region, rather than national politics. I believe what any serious leader in Mombasa needs to focus on is the interest of the local voters and not use the county as a stepping-stone to national leadership. This is the true spirit of devolution.
Many people consider me to be a very keen political adversary of outgoing Governor Hassan Joho. But what they don’t know is that in my early months as senator in 2013, Joho and I were remarkably close politically, which was odd because I came to politics from a background of civil society and human rights. Joho, on the other hand, had for many years been a supplier of goods and services at the port of Mombasa and the then Mombasa Municipality in businesses he ran with his brothers.
Nonetheless, we found common ground in the vision we had for Mombasa, and the dream of the county fulfilling its potential as the gateway to East Africa and a prosperous melting pot for all Kenyan communities.
It is when I came to realise Joho saw politics as an entrepreneurial opportunity to expand his family business and climb up the political ladder, and that the 63 per cent earning under Sh30,000 a month and other issues touching on the well-being of locals were not a pressing priority, that we disagreed. That is why despite having a relatively safe seat in the Senate, I decided to run for governor in 2017.
I believe had I won, Mombasa would have been a very prosperous county
The people of Mombasa are irreversibly fed up. The governor’s priority of a celebrity lifestyle is highly publicised, ironically by the governor himself. His social media accounts are full of images of the glamorous life in major capital cities of the world, or in elite residential palaces in Nairobi and Mombasa and events.
This is with the background of approximately 130,000 unemployed in this high potential county, where the region’s largest port city is domiciled.
It is his intention to preserve his privilege and unjust profiteering. That is why he has moved heaven and earth to sideline the man I had assumed would be my chief rival, Suleiman Shabhal, and persuaded his political godfathers to support the more amenable Abdulsamwad Nassir instead.
People are free to support whomever they want. That is what democracy means. But in their selection of which leaders to support, they reveal a lot about themselves.
The leaders who first supported Joho and now Abdulswamad are people with a national profile and major influence, which they might have used to benefit the people of Mombasa who voted for the Raila-Kalonzo ticket in 2017. However, that was not their priority for their careers were better served with the coast being a vassal region.
The vision of providing higher income jobs for the 600,000 workforce of Mombasa and corruption free good governance that I stood for in 2013, remains what I stand for now. In these circumstances, anyone who sincerely seeks to serve the people of Mombasa has no choice but to be part of the Kenya Kwanza.
There, at least our voices will be heard as we sit at the big table and won’t be compromised. And then we can at last embark on the long journey to our wealth and dignity thereby ending the centuries of humiliation and neglect that the coast has experienced first under the sultans, then under the British colonial government, and then under successive Kenyan presidents with their false promises and empty words.
