Sifuna Has Taken Over The Equitable Party. What Changed on Sunday.

Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna was declared party leader and presidential candidate of The Equitable Party at a ceremony in Nairobi on Sunday, 4 October 2026.

The party is older than the announcement. The Registrar of Political Parties entered it on the register on 25 March 2022, a few months before that year's general election, in which it contested almost nothing and won nothing at all, and it has sat at number 100 on the register ever since without troubling a returning officer anywhere in the country. Its symbol is a weighing scale. The colours are green and yellow. Tusawazishe, the slogan, is Swahili for making things equal, and the registered office is on Mtito Andei Road, off Lenana Road in Nairobi.

Caroli Omondi, the Suba South MP, put it more plainly than anybody else who spoke. "We bought the chassis of the vehicle and we are going to build it," he said. He also said the Kenya we have today has no equity, and read out what the party says it stands for: peace, justice, unity, liberty and plenty for all. Nobody on the podium pretended otherwise.

Who was on the podium

The people standing behind Sifuna carried more information than the party documents did. Babu Owino, the Embakasi East MP, was there. So were Boni Khalwale of Kakamega, Richard Onyonka of Kisii, James Orengo of Siaya and Godfrey Osotsi of Vihiga, all senators, and George Natembeya, the Trans Nzoia Governor. Each of them has been named this year as part of Linda Mwananchi, and several of them are building vehicles of their own.

Khalwale used his turn to warn rather than to celebrate. He told Sifuna the hard part starts now and pressed him to build bridges with the senior opposition names instead of around them. Coming from a Kakamega senator, at a launch with a heavy western Kenya turnout, that was a sentence about arithmetic.

The officials this displaces

Gilbert Marava had been the party leader. Kerry Karani was described on Sunday as the outgoing national chairman, and Eunice Juma, who lives in the United States, as a founding member. None of the three is a national figure. That is the attraction. A dormant registered party comes with a constitution, a certificate and nobody holding a parliamentary seat to defend against a new owner.

Handing one over is not a single meeting, though. The Political Parties Act requires a party changing its officials, constitution, name, symbol, slogan, colours or office address to consider representations from the public and to follow its own rules in doing so. That means a request through the secretary-general's office, a National Executive Committee sitting that approves the incoming officials, and a National Delegates Convention where more than half the leadership is being replaced, with the notices, agendas, attendance lists, resolutions and signatures kept for the Registrar. William Ruto learned in 2012 what happens when the incumbents decline. His attempt to take over the United Democratic Movement was resisted by its chairman and its secretary-general, and he abandoned it for the newly built United Republican Party.

Where this leaves Sifuna himself

He is still the Nairobi Senator, elected on an ODM ticket in 2022, and he no longer holds any office in that party. ODM's National Executive Committee removed him as secretary-general at a meeting in Mombasa on 11 February 2026. He went to the Political Parties Disputes Tribunal and held the removal off briefly, the tribunal later upheld it, and the Registrar took his name off ODM's leadership list on 9 July 2026. Catherine Omanyo, the Busia Woman Representative, has been acting in the post since.

Those are two different losses. Only the second one reaches his Senate seat.

The membership number

Osotsi said more than 600,000 people registered with the party within two hours of the unveiling. No register has been filed. Membership in Kenya becomes a fact only once it sits in a register the Registrar has certified, and for this cycle the parties hand those registers in between 16 and 23 March 2027, which is five months after anybody can check the figure.

What Sunday did not settle

Osotsi told reporters the party takes the Linda Mwananchi Movement name. Citizen Digital reported instead that The Equitable Party would be one of several parties forming an LMM coalition. Those two accounts produce different ballot papers, and nobody on the podium reconciled them.

The party also has eleven days to give the IEBC the names and specimen signatures of its authorised officials. That deadline is 15 October 2026 and it does not move for anybody.

Related: the Jacaranda rally that set this up, what leaving a party costs an elected member, and why so many Kenyan parties last one election.