Jael Mbogo: The trailblazer who made Mwai Kibaki shift base from Nairobi to Othaya

Having turned 91 in January, “politician for life” Jael Mbogo says she is ready to ask God to take her if she witnesses one thing — a Kenyan woman taking oath of office as president.

Like the Biblical Simeon who said he was ready to die after seeing 40-day-old Jesus, Jael says a woman becoming president will be a “mission accomplished” moment for her.

“That time I’ll say, ‘Lord, I’m ready. Please take me quickly.’ But so far, I’m still fighting. I’m still fighting to see one woman,” she says.

It is impossible to relay the mischievous giggle that she makes so many times during our interview and as the witty nonagenarian utters that sentence. 

Currently, she says, she is worried that no woman is showing interest in the presidential position in the 2027 General Election.

“I’m keeping my ears open. I’ve not heard one single woman saying she is in the race,” she says, “I hope God will keep me until the day I see one being sworn in.”

We had quite a task reaching her home perched on a steep slope in Oloolua, Kajiado County. The senior citizen knows how to send a location pin on WhatsApp, which we used to meander past Ngong town to her residence — but not without major misses and dead ends on the dirt roads to her place.

To receive us, she comes out of her house using two walking staffs, and that is just about the only giveaway that she has been in leadership since Kenya was under a governor.

She boasts a rich résumé: Nominated Nairobi councillor in the late 1950s. Third chairperson of Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organisation, succeeding Phoebe Asiyo.

Three-time aspirant for the Bahati MP seat starting from 1969 when she controversially lost to the late Mwai Kibaki in what is widely recognised as the first case of poll rigging in postcolonial Kenya.

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The first national organising secretary of the Forum for Restoration of Democracy (Ford). Personal secretary to Tanzania’s founding president Julius Nyerere in the early 1960s.

Unofficial personal secretary of the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, where she handled roles such as typing the first constitution of the Organisation of African Unity. Recipient of a Moran of the Order of the Burning Spear award in 2018. 

In between those feats are also acts of utter defiance like walking out on the then president Daniel arap Moi and the Kanu party when she was asked to announce that she was relinquishing her candidature for the national organising secretary position during party elections.

“I had canvassed and rallied about five provinces behind me the night before. When we got to KICC in the morning, there was a little yellow card (which listed) Moi’s team of preferred candidates. And all of us were put aside. I was being asked to go to the podium and say I was stepping down for Maina Wanjigi who was now going to be the national organising secretary. I refused. That sent me out of the Kanu party,” she recalls of the 1979 happenings.

Our interview touches on many things, among them the fact that her husband married a second wife because she refused to “stay home and be like any ordinary woman”.

She believes her husband Shadrack Mbogo Adhaya, who died in 2015, became uncomfortable with her involvement in politics.

“Men are always jealous, and, normally, very few will take it easy when the woman becomes so strong, powerful, and popular. They feel a little bit disturbed. He was not the only one, and I cannot blame him,” says Jael, “But I did not ask him marry me.” 

“When you feel that somebody is not comfortable, you give him his freedom, so he went and married another woman, who was ready to sit home, look after him and wash him if necessary,” she quips, and you can tell the Alliance Girl's alumna is a master of sarcasm.

“There is always a price to pay to achieve your goal. This was my dream; to serve the people. To work for my country. To liberate the women in their thousands… marriage was not going to wash (away) my brain, for me to say now I have a big baby here (to take care of),” says Jael, laughing.

She insists that she did not divorce her husband, only that she never let him in her personal space after he got another wife. 

“We never fought about anything. It was his choice. I told him, ‘I’m not going to divorce you, but you are going to stay with your new wife, okay?’” she says.

Both she and her late husband come from Siaya County. They had six children but one died. 

She says of her family name: “For us, ‘Mbogo’ is somebody who is a hero. It has nothing to do with any animal.”

Jael is proud of the way her children have turned out, though she sometimes feels sorry for them because they would go on to be victimised in their careers because of her.

“My children have borne the pain of my political life,” she says as she discusses her regrets in her 91 years on earth.

“Only my firstborn is here in Kenya. The rest are outside because having Jael Mbogo as your mother, you know, you have it the hard way - they’ve even lost jobs, so 30 years ago, some of them immigrated to Europe and are still there,” she says.

What stopped her eldest daughter from relocating, Jael says, was the fact that she set up an accountancy firm.

“When she was working as a financial manager or accountant in private firms, the moment it was discovered that she was my daughter, the following morning, a letter of termination was at the door of her office, so I told her, ‘You went to school and you studied. You are a master’s degree holder, why must you be employed?’ So, she registered her own firm and she’s still working there.”

We then prompt her to give a critique of Maendeleo ya Wanawake, the organisation started in 1952 and which was at one time so powerful that the ruling party, Kanu, had to find a way to infiltrate it. Today, Maendeleo says it has four million members.

She has a few things to say about it. One is that she wanted it to produce the first woman president in Kenya.

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“I had made up my mind to make Maendeleo ya Wanawake, in the first four elections, to have a woman president in Kenya,” she says.

That was never to be.

She also reveals that she was in the team that conceptualised Maendeleo House, the organisation’s 10-floor building put up with the assistance of the government.

Showing us a photo of her from the February 7, 1965 edition of the Daily Nation, she says she held the first-ever fundraiser towards the construction of the structure.

“The idea of putting up the Maendeleo House was mine,” she says, “We were putting up this headquarters to be the focal point for fundraising to develop other headquarters for women at provincial levels.”

So, what does she think of the current state of Maendeleo? She thinks it is not serving its purpose.

“This headquarters now is earning a lot of money... Nobody is sending money to the women in the provinces or the counties to develop themselves through the earnings of the headquarters,” she says, adding, “I worked for Maendeleo for 10 years and I did not earn even one single penny.”

We contacted the current chair of Maendeleo, Ms Rahab Muiu, for a rebuttal. Together with the organisation’s national secretary, Elizabeth Mayieka, and national treasurer Susan Owino, they said that with all due respect to the elder, she is out of touch with the current goings-on at the organisation.

While not denying that she earns from her position, Ms Muiu, who has been the chair since 2014, said: “Salaries which were paid in the 60s are not the salaries which are being paid today, so I don’t think I want to go there.”

She disclosed that Maendeleo House, which hosts the Goethe Institute among other tenants, makes about Sh55 million a year, and that the monies go to expenses like electricity, water, security, salaries, and allowances, showing us a recent audit by Baker Tilly and the latest approval papers from the NGO Board. She also had a slideshow played with photos from the annual general meeting held in Sagana in December.

“We do have our failings, but we have tried to regularise the institution,” she said.

She also refuted claims that Maendeleo is not playing an active role in Kenya’s political landscape.

“Everybody in Kenya knows the campaigns we did in 2022 as Maendeleo,” says Ms Muiu.

Maendeleo’s national secretary, Ms Mayieka, said: “I have served under three chairpersons and I want to disagree with Mama Jael Mbogo. I have not seen her in the over 25 years I have been here. She has not come to complain; she has not visited this building. If she cared so much, she should have come and met the leadership and launched her complaint.”

Mrs Owino, the organisation’s treasurer, noted that Jael turned down an offer to attend Maendeleo’s 70th-anniversary celebrations in 2022 despite initially promising to do so.

The Maendeleo leadership also noted that Jael has not been keen to receive them as they would like to visit her and give her a 10,000-litre water tank as they have done with other past leaders of the organisation.

“If she has a moment, we still have a 10,000-litre water tank to deliver to her,” said Ms Muiu. 

“We’ve gone visiting all of them (previous leaders). She never gave us the opportunity,” said Mrs Owino.

The Maendeleo topic brings up the hard-hitting nature of Jael — a woman who does not mince her words. She says this is all part of the mission she is living, all part of her efforts to pay back her parents. 

Born in the Rift Valley, she was moved by the sacrifices made by her parents, who worked in plantations. Among the sacrifices her father made was waking up at 5am every day to make sure she crossed a river on her way to school.

“When I got an education, I had a vision and a mission. The first was to work hard to see that if I got married, my children would not suffer the same thing I went through,” she says.

“My other dream was the economic liberation and economic emancipation of women.”

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Those dreams, she says, are what make her obsessed with having women in leadership. She is happy that women governors and other leaders are cropping up, and she wants the women to target the top prize. She is proud of Charity Ngilu and Martha Karua, among other women, for aiming at the presidency.

“I’m still asking them to come out and do it. That was my main intention: to go out. It is not easy,” she says, “I was called names: prostitute and what-have-you, fortunately, these things are not written on my forehead. Jael is still Jael.”

“I may not have achieved everything, and I may not have succeeded in all, but I am satisfied when I see about four or five women governors now. I see ministers. I see councillors and MCAs. I see directors and chairpersons of various corporations and companies. That was my dream,” she adds.

She was raised at her rural home in Ugenya. For her secondary education, she went to Ng’iya Girls and for her high school, as well as Alliance Girls. She also went to the US on a scholarship where she studied home economics. Even from her high school days, she could feel the politician inside her urging her on.

When she got a job with the Nairobi County Council and consequently got a residence in Ofafa, she would get to interact with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and this shaped her political ideology. Jaramogi was a famous dweller of Eastlands at a time when police would arrest people at will.

“Coming from Eastlands to the town was a big challenge,” she says of the sunset years of the colonial government.

“It was just automatic that we all gathered at Makadara and waited for Jaramogi to come to lead us into town. Walking with him was great fun.”

“He (Jaramogi) was always campaigning for the release of Kenyatta and his colleagues. I was very impressed and I decided to pursue this line further,” she adds.

Jael was one of the speakers during an event held in Kisumu last month to mark the 30th anniversary of Jaramogi’s death.

“It was very, very special and wonderful that I had the chance to interact with him at a very close level. When he was vice president, I used to do his paperwork. I was with him when he was constructing the constitution of the Organisation of African Unity. He wrote it and I typed it, bound it before he took it to Addis Ababa,” she says.

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She notes that she was not his official secretary but because of her secretarial and stenography training, she often worked with him. She says he trusted her with confidential documents.

“He could only trust two women: Me and Akumu Dennis’ wife (Grace). He realised that he could bank on us. If it was something confidential, he wanted it to be done outside the vice president’s office, I was always there,” says Jael.

Having worked with some of the major political parties in Kenya, Jael says most parties in Kenya are just special-purpose cars.

“The majority are what we call briefcase political parties because they are owned by one person and they will only become active two, three months before the election,” she says. 

“In Kenya, maybe ODM is trying. ODM has an ideology. It’s a social democratic party. The rest, they don’t even know what ideology means. That is why it is so easy for somebody to walk in and out of the party at will.”

One of her “badges of honour” from her participation in politics is that the government has kept a Sh5,000 deposit she made before challenging the outcome of the Bahati constituency election in 1974.

“The government owes me money. I have a letter saying that I should be refunded the money, but I never saw it. I tried to follow it and I said, ‘Ah, to hell, let it stay there.’ But they would have to return it with interest,” she says as her laughter fills the room.

Living a quiet life with a house help at her beck and call, Jael is sure to inform us of the magic of the Hass avocado growing in her compound. She dries the pulp from the ripe fruits to extract oil and shreds then dries the seeds to make a spice. 

Living healthy, staying sharp, and closely monitoring the country’s political scene. Having dabbled in the life of a secretary, a women leader, a politician, a wife, a mother, a timber trader, and a columnist in the Daily Nation among others, she still stays in politics even after pulling the plug on most other activities. A life member of politics, if you may.

“There is no quitting in politics,” she says. “Once you are in, you are in, like a teacher. Like a priest. You cannot retire.”

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