Must a presidential candidate be owner of a political party?
Health Opinion
By
Festus Odingo
| Sep 25, 2026
Kenyan politics has developed a curious ritual. The moment a politician begins to look presidential, someone immediately asks: Where is his party?
Not his ideas. Not his programme for government. Not the team he is building. Not what he would do differently with our battered institutions. The first question is often about the political vehicle. And preferably, it should be his vehicle.
This is how we have ended up with a political garage overflowing with parties, alliances, coalitions and acronyms—many of them distinguishable less by ideology than by the name of the politician holding the keys.
The current conversations surrounding Linda Mwananchi bring this old habit into sharp focus. The movement has generated political momentum, but debate increasingly revolves around which party will become its vehicle.
Perhaps this is the moment to ask a more fundamental question: Must every presidential ambition come with party ownership? The Constitution says no.
Article 137 is uncomplicated. A presidential candidate may be nominated by a political party or may stand as an independent candidate, provided the candidate satisfies the other constitutional requirements.
Our political imagination, however, sometimes appears considerably narrower than our Constitution. We have become accustomed to the idea that a serious politician must first acquire a party, preferably become its unquestioned leader, assemble regional kingpins who arrive carrying their own parties, and then retreat to perform that Kenyan ritual: electoral mathematics.
You bring 1.2 million votes. I bring 800,000. Someone else brings a mountain, another brings a lake, another promises a valley. Add, subtract, divide Cabinet positions, carry the remainder—and voilà, a government is supposedly born. The voter occasionally appears in this calculation, mostly as arithmetic.
This is not an argument against political parties. Parties are indispensable institutions in a multiparty democracy. But there is an enormous difference between building a political party and owning one.
A genuine party should be able to survive its founder. Members should be able to disagree with its leader without being treated like tenants insulting the landlord. Candidates should emerge through internal democracy rather than waiting for the owner to distribute tickets.
If a politician must own a party before feeling politically secure, perhaps the problem is not insufficient parties. Perhaps it is insufficient trust in our political institutions.
And this matters enormously for emerging movements. When a movement begins generating public enthusiasm, the temptation is to convert every prominent personality into a separate centre of political power. One leader gets a party. Another acquires another. A third reserves an acronym. Eventually everyone promises that these separate vehicles will meet en route to State House and form a coalition.
There is an unmistakable sense of déjà vu. New movement, new acronyms, new political vehicles, same old arithmetic. Soon the conversation shifts from What does this movement believe? to Who gets what? Who becomes presidential candidate? Who becomes running mate? Who gets Speaker? Which region gets which ministry?
What begins as a people’s movement can quickly become an à la carte negotiation: presidency for one, running mate for another, Speaker for a third, Cabinet slots for everyone else. A political tête-à-tête among elites, while the mwananchi who supplied the votes waits outside.
That would be particularly unfortunate for Linda Mwananchi or any other emerging political formation. Its most valuable political asset may not ultimately be a certificate from the Registrar of Political Parties. It may be the momentum, identity and public expectation it has generated.
That, surely, should be the raison d’être of any movement claiming to offer something different: not merely capturing power, but organising citizens around a coherent alternative.
Momentum needs organisation, certainly. It needs recognised leadership, democratic decision-making, credible communication channels, grassroots structures and eventually a clear electoral strategy.
But organisation does not necessarily mean every ambitious leader needs a party in his pocket.
Nor should the independent route be romanticised. An independent presidential candidate would face an enormous organisational challenge. Winning the presidency is one thing; governing while building durable support in Parliament is another. The Constitution also provides a serious parliamentary process for presidential impeachment, requiring specified thresholds in both the National Assembly and Senate.
But party ownership is not the same thing as political strength, just as possessing a title deed does not make one an architect.
A presidential candidate could theoretically run independently while supporting candidates for Parliament who share a common programme. A movement could organise around principles before deciding the electoral vehicle. Existing parties could cooperate around clearly negotiated policy commitments rather than merely assembling personalities and regional vote baskets.
There are many constitutional and political roads to power. We should resist pretending there is only one.
As 2027 approaches, Kenya does not necessarily need another alphabet soup of parties assembled around individual presidential ambitions. It needs political organisations—whether parties, coalitions, movements or independent candidatures—that are larger than the personalities occupying them.
Let parties belong to their members. Let movements belong to their causes. Let leaders compete on ideas.
And perhaps, just perhaps, we can finally retire the peculiar Kenyan assumption that before someone can present a vision for governing 50 million people, they must first own a political party.
After all, State House is an elective office. It is not the final branch of a family business.
The writer is an Econ-statistician and Development Economist