Catherine Waruguru: Charming daredevil with shifting loyalties

Laikipia Woman Rep Catherine Waruguru’s grandmother had predicted that she would make a good Christian evangelist, but she became a politician instead.

Ms Waruguru, who studied theology at the Karatina Institute, is cutting for herself the image of an unpredictable politician.

Her singing of this political wing’s song at this moment is no guarantee that she will not insert the chorus of the competitor while looking you straight in the eye.

“But who is trying to spread that narrative that I am unpredictable? How many political formations have I been associated with? I am very predictable, since I have only belonged to Jubilee as the mother title to the subdivisions in it,” she says.

Waruguru says she was nominated MCA in Laikipia after the 2013 elections by The National Alliance (TNA) party before being elected woman rep in 2017 on a Jubilee ticket.

“In TNA, our boss was President Uhuru Kenyatta as well as in Jubilee. In 2018, Jubilee split into Kieleweke and Tangatanga and I associated with the latter,” she says.

“While loyal to our boss, I declared support for the Handshake politics. But now, I have explored the subdivisions in Jubilee and moved into the Hustler Nation.” 

Besides Mr Kenyatta, she has also been loyal to ODM’s Raila Odinga and Deputy President William Ruto.

And she poses: “How can one be judged to be disloyal in the family tree when all he/she is doing is to visit relatives within that family? I have all along belonged to the political wing that has the President as the party leader and now deserting him because he is going home in 2022.”

While she said she supported Kenyatta in 2013 because he was cool and pragmatic, she said she joined Tangatanga in 2018 when the President became aloof. She then joined Mr Odinga’s camp, saying he was a patriot and dismissed the Deputy President as a liar.

Now marshalling National Assembly votes to push through a cancer bill that would subsidise treatment costs and make health insurance schemes mandatory, she is also busy in philanthropy through her Cate Waruguru Foundation.

She promotes a programme called Fanikisha Youth that enables young high school dropouts to acquire vocational skills.

In September, she dismissed the “hustler movement” as a conglomerate of liars.

“We have been busy going round the country dishing out handouts and giving false promises with Dr Ruto… When I accompanied Dr Ruto to Laikipia, he promised several buses to schools and we are still waiting for them,” she explained why she decamped to the Handshake wing in September only to bolt back three months later.

“Other regions are busy doing development projects and I have decided that I will not take my people to the Opposition.”

She said she left the Handshake duo because “our President today is a captive of Mr Odinga, who has become his personal assistant, that if you want an appointment with the President, you got first to call Mr Odinga, who will reroute your call to State House”.

But even her harshest critics give her three strengths — looks, oratory skills and daredevil mien that make her opponents cower at the thought of battling her.

“Cate is one of those people who can tell you anything, anyhow and regardless of the platform. If she believes what she is saying will work to her advantage, she will certainly say it…and she can walk into the devil’s kitchen if she believes her cake is there,” said Elizabeth Njenga, a resident of Nanyuki.

Fondly referred to as Mama Simba (lioness) and “Mrembo wa Laikipia” (Laikipia’s beauty), she says she is a product of hard work and determination and nothing ever came her way easily.

She says her inspiration is her grandmother, Catherine Wandia, who raised her singlehandedly.

“She is my true north…my fortress…the only one who can stop me dead in my tracks in whatever I’m up to. She introduced me to the world of possibilities and the fear of God. She told me to invest in faith… sensitised me that faith does not make things easy but makes them possible,” she says.

Having declared that she wants the Laikipia East parliamentary seat on a United Democratic Alliance (UDA) party that preaches the bottom-up economic empowerment model, Waruguru says, “I am ready to take all in it head-on and they better have their plot right since I will give them the mother of all battles.”

Asked whether she is not being hypocritical, hopping from the President’s wing to the DP’s rebels side to Mr Odinga’s camp and back to the DP’s side, she responds: “It is our boss who showed us how to behave like that.”

She says President Kenyatta’s political career had provided the inspiration for abandoning political positions at the slightest provocation.

“He was in Kanu, decamped to support President Mwai Kibaki in 2007, and in 2013 ditched Kanu to found TNA before he founded Jubilee in 2017,” she says.

“Today, he is headed to ODM, where he was in 2005 during the Banana and Orange camps. We are only good students under his tutorage.”

On that political ice road, she says, the President has executed unique political acrobatics “like effecting a Handshake with Dr Wiiliam Ruto in 2013 when nearly all, including himself, believed it was impossible, shook the hand of Mr Odinga after he found him running away from treason by swearing himself in as a ‘people’s President’ and also now, reneging on a public promise to support his deputy to succeed him.”

She adds: “I’m not a hypocrite…I have never been one. I have never prayed publicly in my mother tongue, beseeching God to help me escape the International Criminal Court case on crimes against humanity and as thanksgiving will hand over support to my deputy and reneged.”

In 2010, Ms Waruguru joined the Kenya Institute of Management for a diploma in management. She then joined Karatina University for a bachelor’s degree in business management and graduated in 2016, before earning a master’s degree in management and innovation at KCA.

She has worked as manager at internet provider Access Kenya, and swears by the hills of her Nyeri County roots that she has never relied on the power of godfathers to scale her political ladder.

Whether she will announce another big political move from “Hustler Nation” to another wing or back to her trail of loyalties, time will tell.

[email protected]