Former Ganze Member of Parliament, Peter Shehe, won the Jaribuni ward elections on a United Democratic Alliance (UDA) ticket without campaigning.
Shehe won the hotly contested seat after garnering 1,956 votes and defeating 16 other candidates.
Fellow contestants noted that Shehe did not campaign as hard as they did since the locals always liked him.
They noted that when they were running up and down pleading with voters to accept them and choose them on August 9, Shehe would meet villagers in his home and have tea with them every morning.
“He is a man of the people. Every morning the villagers would gather in his compound to take breakfast and that is when he told them about his plans to vie and explained to them his manifesto. He was never on the campaign trail,” Michael Kithi, a UDA candidate for the neighbouring Sokoke Ward was quoted by The Standard.
“When all of us in the UDA camp were running up and down, he was never bothered. It looks like he knew that he would win.”
Shehe was elected Ganze Member of Parliament in 2013 on a Federal Party of Kenya (FPK) party ticket but lost the seat in 2017 to Teddy Mwambire.
After the loss, he moved to Switzerland with his family and came back barely four months to the 2022 General Election.
Elsewhere, journalist Juma Chengo won the Mnarani MCA seat as an independent candidate, beating 16 other contestants.
Juma garnered 2,724 votes, beating his closet challenger, ODM’s Omar Kutta by over 978 votes.
“I was initially in UDA because I believed in their bottom-up agenda, but the ticket was given to someone else. I, however, did not lose hope,” Chengo stated.
“I studied journalism and I used it as a tool to change society, I wanted to be the voice of the voiceless. I realised I could do more for the people as a politician.”
Chengo did not have money for campaigns and he opted to trek from village-to-village to deliver his manifesto to the people.
