NEW YEAR: 2022

New Year’s Eve fell on a Friday, and I watched the fireworks go off over the top of the Britam—or was it the UAP Towers?—from an Airbnb near Kenyatta Market. I wondered how many of the patients at the nearby infectious disease unit compound wouldn’t make it to see the dawn of 2022, this being the midnight of the twilight of COVID-19.

Sure enough, as night turned to day, I watched a Montezuma hearse leave the compound from my window just after sunrise.

Later, I left the Sagwe Apartments for my new flat in South B after clearing my arrears at the old residence so they would allow me to collect my belongings: TV, couch, bookshelf, bed, and books. No newly minted bachelor needs a four-bedroom rooftop apartment to start a new life!

By Sunday, I was well-settled (Netflix, Safaricom Home Fiber), so the morning of Monday, 3 January, 2022, found me bright and early at the offices of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) on the 19th floor of Anniversary Towers in the CBD. With many shops and almost all offices still closed due to New Year’s hangovers across the city, and the town streets half-deserted, I half-expected to find the IEBC offices ghostlike and sparsely staffed.

To my surprise, the offices were bustling—if not with would-be politicians like me, then at least with workers. Helpful workers! And in the months to come, no matter the national outrage or outcome, I would continue to find the IEBC officials, whether at Anniversary Towers or on the ground in Lang'ata, to be the most helpful of public servants.

The first day of my journey toward becoming a Member of County Assembly (MCA) in Kenya had just begun, and I had absolutely no idea what kind of loony roller coaster ride I had just entered for the next seven months and seven days.

I was given the requirements for becoming an MCA by a middle-aged Kisii woman at the IEBC offices. There were two routes to the County Assembly.

First was the independent candidate’s path, which required one to fill out a Form of Intention to Contest, which I fully intended to do. This required a clearance certificate from the Registrar of Political Parties confirming I had not been a member of any political party in the past three months. Excellent! I had never belonged to a single political party in my life.

I also had to establish and maintain a functioning office in the ward. I was prepared to give a vacate notice to my upper-SQ tenant in Nairobi West—specifically one Ruth, not because she was a worse tenant than the others, but because the downstairs house was more accessible to voters coming to hear what their visionary new MCA had to offer.

But it was the fourth requirement on the independents' list that was the insurmountable hurdle: "Duly fill a list and provide an electronic version of at least 500 supporters, and copies of their national IDs, submittable to the IEBC."

Wueh!

Clearly, getting 500 supporters to sign on before an election is held is hard enough. Getting suspicious Kenyans to give a copy of their ID to a politicking "fraudster" is a Herculean task, and I have deep respect for those independent candidates. (As it turned out, the number 547 would come to haunt me later).

The conditions for candidates contesting through political parties were:

·   A valid identity card (ID)

·   A good photo (I had an excellent one where my dreadlocks were out of sight, hair cropped short at the sides, my eyes warm and slightly dreamy behind my artsy spectacles, a slight closed-lip smile showing dimples à la Sakaja, and a maroon T-shirt with gold on the collar).

Of course, one also required a duly signed Code of Conduct, a Self-Declaration Form, a nomination form from the Commission, and a nomination certificate from a fully registered political party (duly signed by an authorized official of the party—more on that later).

By the time I left Anniversary Towers that mid-morning, several forms in hand and having written a letter and made payment for the voter rolls from the 2017 election to see who would be voting, I already knew my first task. I had to find a political party that would be happy to have Tony as its candidate for the Nairobi West Ward seat!

For whatever reason, Maendeleo Chap Chap hadn’t materialized. My friend and fellow EPL football fanatic, Mwingi West MP Charles Ngana Ngusya (CNN), assured me that if I wanted a Wiper nomination for Nairobi West, he could get it for me. But with his party leader, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, being a bitter foe of my great friend Governor Alfred Mutua, Wiper was as attractive as keeping a viper as a house pet.

I briefly considered the Muungano Party, whose chair was then Governor Kivutha Kibwana, a humble man and healthcare champion who had taught me jurisprudence at the Parklands Law Campus, University of Nairobi, at the turn of the millennium. But unable to reach him on his personal phone that week, I dropped that option.

In spite of being called "Wajackoyah" on the streets thanks to my spectacles and dreadlocks, the Roots Party wasn't on my radar. Its one-item agenda was to legalize Cannabis sativa (bhang), and weed has never been my thing; I’m a mere vodka aficionado.

I had many friends in KANU (Kenya African National Union), from officials like Joshua Oluoch to "Khan of KANU," whose sister was married to its national chair, but I quickly discovered that Sam, a former bouncer for the musician Redsan, had sewn up that seat. Besides, I wasn't sure if the Cockerel Party still carried the political baggage of old oppression. I was afraid of losing older voters to this legacy, although in all fairness, KANU at this time—two years after the death of President Daniel arap Moi—was more an echo than a present-day political voice.

That week, I went hunting for the Democratic Congress offices in South B, where I lived, just a bridge away from Nairobi West Ward. But I could not locate Shikangu Road, not even on Google Maps.

Not to be discouraged, I met a couple of officers from the Party of National Unity (PNU) at Safari Park the following week. I went with a motivational speaker, Dr. Reuben West, who was in Kenya to promote "civil campaigning"—an oxymoron in Kenyan political circles. One earful of the Black American’s accent and the two officials—a pudgy, bald dude with the build of a toad in a suit and a slim fellow in a vest, leather hat, and shades that gave him the look of a Yakuza gangster—were demanding dollars from Dr. West for my party nomination certificate.

"Hey," I protested. "It is I, a jobless journalist, who wishes to run, not the good American."

Technically, I was in conversation with Mutinda Munyao, managing editor of The EastAfrican, who wished to recruit me as a special correspondent for the regional paper. This meeting with the Toad and the Yakuza took place on Monday, 31 January. It was the end of the first month of 2022, four weeks after I had first visited the IEBC and six months and nine days before the election—and I still had no political vehicle on which to run.

Perhaps it was time to look further afield.

CPK

On Thursday, 10 February, 2022, I found myself at the Mombasa Club, not far from Fort Jesus, listening to my old pal Walter Mongare of the Umoja Summit Party of Kenya (USP) give a talk that left me in stitches, but nobody from USP ever got back to me.

Two days later, I left the Severin Sea Lodge and went to Kilifi to attend a PAA (Pamoja African Alliance) meeting. PAA had been founded by then-Kilifi Governor Amason Kingi, whom I had met back in law school. I loved the party name, not just because of the "Ubuntu" in its slogan, but because PAA Crescent was the estate where I grew up and where I still own the childhood home my late mother left behind. PAA Crescent is part of the Tysons Estate maisonettes, right at the edge of Nairobi West Ward. I considered PAA my stronghold, my home front, and the heart of my support.

What more romantic party than PAA to run on?

But it was not to be! After returning to Nairobi, an old comrade, Booker Omole, invited me to a press conference at the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK) offices near Arboretum Park. Their offices were impressive, with large framed photos of Lenin and Fidel Castro on the wall and lots of activists on the lawn, including Mwatate MP Andrew Mwadime, an unassuming fellow who kept showing me a bag of rough gems from his constituency that he kept in his jacket pocket.

Mwadime, a one-time quarry worker, was now the area MP and felt betrayed by the Azimio la Umoja coalition, which had chosen to give the party ticket to the incumbent governor, Granton Samboja. He had decamped to the Communist Party for rescue, but would soon bolt again to run—and win—as the first-ever independent governor in the Coastal Region. Meanwhile, he fingered those rough gemstones as if they were lucky beads or charm stones.

After the press conference, where we all enthusiastically sang "The Internationale" in Swahili, I sequestered myself for lunch with the CPK General Secretary, Benedict Wachira, a hardworking fellow with a direct, charming manner.

I had been to modern-day Russia several times, including to cover the 2018 World Cup, but I had always regarded Communist parties—including one I joined for fun in Venice in 2013 on a dare—as relics of the USSR, save for the Chinese Communist Party.

By the time I walked out of the CPK offices and caught a Bolt in the late afternoon of Valentine’s Day, the streets red with roses, I too had become an official "Red." After I dropped by the Equity Bank on Market Street to withdraw and M-Pesa the Ksh20,000 required for the party ticket, I was officially a Communist Party aspirant for MCA.

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