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Dr Juliet Kimemiah describes campaign financing limits for elective seats, from the presidency down to county wards, as “humongous”.
She has tested the waters before, vying for the Kiambu senatorial seat in 2017 and the governorship in 2022, and is now eyeing the county's top seat again in 2027 on a Kanu ticket. She knows exactly what a huge financial investment in campaigning means, and how it can knock a candidate off balance, even to the point of ruining their business.
“I can tell you for sure, I'm going for the governor's seat, but I don't have that kind of money, and neither did I when I vied in the previous elections,” she says.
Read: Why Kenyan women pay more to enter politics
But her lack of money did not stop her from securing the Kanu ticket. Dr Kimemiah says the party gave her the gubernatorial nomination certificate without requiring her to pay the Sh1 million nomination fee.
"I didn't pay a cent," she says, describing the party's support as one of the interventions that allowed her to enter the race despite lacking the financial resources her competitors had.
Having gone through the campaign cycle before, she says she witnessed the scale of spending by male gubernatorial candidates in Kiambu, with one spending about Sh600 million and another more than Sh300 million.
The financial burden, she says, can have devastating consequences. One of the candidates who spent more than Sh300 million eventually saw his company collapse.