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Raila Odinga’s running mate Martha Karua has projected herself a liberation and an anti-corruption warrior.

Karua recently said people who have spent years fighting for greater freedoms and good governance  have never risen to the apex of country’s leadership.

“In this country, people who have fought for liberation have never occupied the presidency. At independence it was not those who were in the forest who occupied it. It was others. After the 2002 liberation, it was not those who were in the trenches who occupied it. We went into government but we were not in the presidency. This is a unique time. It is the only time that those who have fought for liberation are likely to sit in the presidency,” she said.

Both Karua and Raila were part of a group of politicians, activists and religious leaders who campaigned for the restoration of multiparty politics in the early 1990s.

A lawyer by profession, Karua represented Raila and other politicians arrested for organising the Saba Saba rally on July 7, 1990. Others were Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia, icons in the fight for the reintroduction of multipartism.

She was elected to Parliament in first multiparty elections in 1992 to represent Gichugu constituency in Kirinyaga.

A decade later, she was part of the opposition National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) which swept Mwai Kibaki to power. Incidentally, she is the leader of Narc Kenya, one of the coalition’s splinters.

Karua served in two dockets in President Kibaki’s Cabinet, first as Water minister between 2003 and 2007 and as Justice and Constitutional Affairs minister after the disputed 2007 election.

The dispute led to establishment of the Grand Coalition Government which incorporated Raila, who had controversially lost the election to Kibaki, as prime minister. 

As Justice minister, Karua was to midwife the birth of a new constitutional order, which was part of the  post-election reconciliation agreements.

She, however, resigned from the Cabinet in 2009, a year to the referendum on the new Constitution, claiming she had been overlooked in key decisions taken by the Kibaki administration.

Karua graduated with a law degree from the University of Nairobi in 1980. She was appointed a magistrate and served in various courts until 1987 when she quit for private practice.

She unsuccessfully ran for president in the 2013 General Election.

If she becomes the first female deputy president,  she has promised to stick by the rules saying she will be a deputy not a co-president.