2002 Elections
Rally That Cast Nyachae Wife Into Politics
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- Published on Wednesday, 18 July 2007 03:47
On this occasion, Ford People presidential candidate Simeon Nyachae and veteran politician John Keen were the chief guests at the campaign rally. The tall and light-skinned lady did not feel intimidated and she fitted into the political matrix of the day.
Active politics, and especially the kind that involved public speaking, had never been anywhere in her wildest dreams, but this hot afternoon, mid this year, would alter that course. It was the first time in Kenya's history that a presidential candidate's wife would rise to address a campaign rally. She did it with dexterity and proficiency.
Many rallies later, Mrs Grace Wamuyu Nyachae still remembers the Namanga rally. A thunderous round of applause greeted her. She appeared to have innate public speaking qualities, never shying away and delivering her points with alacrity. Even during our interview, she concentrated on the subject and maintained eye contact.
Since the Namanga meeting, Grace has accompanied her husband to many campaign rallies and broken the belief that the wives of the high and mighty can only be seen with their spouses at State functions.
And as the campaigns hit the home stretch, she recently conducted a meet-the-people tour of Nairobi, addressed several meetings and returned to her Mathira birth place at the weekend to seek votes for Mr Nyachae.
Honest person
She concedes that she was never to be in the campaign team initially. "But when I addressed that first meeting in Namanga and everyone in our team saw the enthusiasm with which the crowds wanted to hear more, they took me on board," Grace said.
Since then, she has relentlessly carried on with the message: "My husband is an honest person who can deliver the pledges he has made to Kenyans. It is that flat honesty that some people who don't think very well of him misinterpret for hot temper. It's that honesty that cost him his job in the Cabinet. I want Kenyans to know that as president, he would then be honest enough to honour his contract.
"I have never known him to talk carelessly, or for the sake of it, or promise something that he well knew he couldn't do. And that's why I'm convinced that he should be Kenya's next president."
If Mr Nyachae finally makes it to State House, it will not be Grace's first visit to the corridors of power. After completing a year's secretarial course at the Government Secretarial College in 1969, Grace, then 19, was one of the two women graduates who were picked to work at State House.
"I still remember my reporting day that as I approached State House, I saw the presidential outriders approaching and panicked. I hid in the flowers to emerge after the motorcade had left," she remembers.
More was yet to come for when Mzee Jomo Kenyatta asked her into his office days later, she was over-awed. "I stepped into his office hesitantly and with a note book and pen in hand. I stood there and thought that it wasn't really true. When he opened his mouth to speak, my hands shook and my pen slipped off. Mzee (Kenyatta) waited until I picked up the pen and composed myself," she recalls.
She was later posted to the Central provincial headquarters in Nyeri Town, where she met Mr Nyachae, then area provincial commissioner. They married in 1969 and they have four grown up children.
During out interview last week at her private office, she came across as a woman of taste and style but would not be drawn into a chat on what changes in decor would be expected at State House if she becomes the first lady.
"I'm more interested in promoting the affairs of children who come from less fortunate backgrounds. I'm touched and moved by the plight of those children suffering from cancer and others who are abandoned in the streets."
Personal contributions
She is involved in raising funds and making personal contributions to the Bethlehem Community Centre in Kayole and the New Life Home in Milimani, Nairobi. She also runs her Hope Centre in Kisii, which cares mainly for HIV/Aids orphans and abandoned local children.
"These children are not a 'risk' but deserving of the care and attention that every child requires," she says. "I'm driven by my gratitude to God for giving us children that we have been able to educate and bring up into mature and responsible people. In what other way could I possibly thank God?"
Grace, the third born in a family of seven, was born in February 1949 at Kiawarigi village, Nyeri. Her father, Mr Cyrus Karue, is a former soldier and civil servant. She was one of the first five pupils from Ichuga Primary School to be selected to join the newly founded Tumu Tumu High School in the early 1960s. She quit the Civil Service in 1980 to help in the management of the family's Sansora Group of companies.
