George Mwangala

1/3 Sifuna Too Young to Lead? In 1963 He Would Have Been Too Old. @edwinsifuna Edwin Sifuna is 44. In 2026, that apparently makes him too young to lead Kenya. In 1963, it would have made him one of the older men in the room. That is the uncomfortable truth our political elders would rather we forget. The Kenya that won independence was not built by grey-haired patriarchs waiting patiently for their turn. It was built by young men and women in their twenties and thirties who were handed the keys to a nation and told to make it work. Today, the beneficiaries of that faith in youth are telling a 44-year-old senator to sit down and wait. Either we are very poor in history, or we suffer from a serious case of selective amnesia. The latest round began when COTU Secretary General Francis Atwoli suggested Sifuna is too young to run for the presidency and should wait his turn. The Constitution sets the minimum age for a presidential candidate at 35. Sifuna clears that bar by nine years. So the objection is not legal. It is cultural, and measured against our own past, it is nonsense. The boy wonder who built a nation Start with Tom Mboya. He was in his early twenties when he took charge of the Kenya Federation of Labour. He was elected to the Legislative Council at 27. At 28 he chaired the All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra and stood before the leaders of an entire continent. That same year, still only 28, he stood beside Martin Luther King Jr. before 20,000 people at the Washington Monument, demanding an end to segregated schools in America. Weeks later, King personally went to Atlanta airport to welcome his plane, then hosted a dinner in his honour and introduced him as a symbol of the world's hunger for freedom and human dignity. Let that sink in. The most celebrated moral voice of the twentieth century treated a 28-year-old Kenyan as a peer. In March 1960, at 29, he was on the cover of TIME magazine, the first Kenyan ever to appear there. At around 30 he was the founding Secretary General of KANU and a leading negotiator at Lancaster House, sitting across the table from the British Empire and bargaining for our independence. He was a Cabinet Minister in his early thirties and wrote the blueprint of Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 at 35. He was assassinated at 38. Everything we honour Tom Mboya for, he achieved before reaching Sifuna's current age. The greatest proof of what a young man can do is the Airlift.In 1959, a 29-year-old Mboya looked at a colony on the eve of freedom and saw a nation with almost no university graduates to run it. He did not wait for permission. He did not wait for the colonial government, which was openly hostile to the idea. He flew to America, knocked on doors, raised money from ordinary Americans, persuaded colleges to open their gates, and won the backing of Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, Martin Luther King Jr. and a young senator named John F. Kennedy. Between 1959 and 1963, hundreds of young Kenyans and East Africans crossed the Atlantic to study at American universities. Look at who came out of that dream. Wangari Maathai, who went on to become the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Barack Obama Sr., a young economist from Siaya whose American education belongs to that same wave of Mboya's scholarship drive, and whose son would one day sit in the White House. Doctors, engineers, economists, diplomats and professors who would staff ministries, hospitals and universities across a newly independent Kenya. Pause on that. A man under 30 conceived, funded and executed one of the most consequential human capital projects in African history. He shaped the future of a nation, and arguably the politics of the most powerful country on earth, before his 30th birthday. Today we tell a 44-year-old senator he lacks the maturity to lead.