Peter Mburu Karanja

It is with profound sorrow that we announce the passing of Hon. PETER MBURU KARANJA, Member of the County Assembly for Ol Kalou Ward, on 12th December 2025 at Nyahururu County Referral Hospital. Husband to Jane Wanjiru; father to Kevin and Lilian; brother to Samuel and many; son of the late Mzee Karanja. Family and friends meet daily at Ol Kalou at 5.00 pm. Cortege leaves Nyahururu Funeral Home on Friday 19th December at 7.30 am for a funeral service at PCEA Ol Kalou Parish, followed by burial at the family home. M-Pesa Paybill 745190, Account MBURU. Rest in peace, Honourable.

Honourable Peter Mburu Karanja kept a small notebook in which he wrote the name of every funeral he attended, and by the time he died it held more than eleven hundred entries. It is the kind of detail that explains why Ol Kalou ward re-elected him twice by landslides: when his constituents mourned, he turned up, sat on a plastic chair and stayed to the end.

He was born in Ol Kalou in 1969, the first son of a potato farmer, and studied at Mahiga Secondary, where he was the school's best debater. He trained as a quantity surveyor at Kenya Polytechnic and worked for a Nakuru roads contractor for ten years before returning home to run a small hardware and agrovet business. His neighbours say that is where he learnt politics: by listening to farmers argue over the price of seed.

He was first elected Member of the County Assembly for Ol Kalou Ward in 2013. In three terms he championed the tarmacking of the road from Ol Kalou to the Njabini market, a cold-storage shed for potato farmers, and bursaries for more than two thousand students. He was known for turning up in gumboots, for refusing a government driver and for answering his own phone at midnight.

Outside politics he sang tenor in the PCEA Ol Kalou choir, coached an under-fourteen football team and loved boiled arrowroots with fresh milk. His children say he had one rule at home: no politics at the dinner table before the second helping.

He died at Nyahururu County Referral Hospital on 12 December 2025 after a short illness, aged fifty-six.

He leaves his wife Jane, two children, his brothers and sisters and a ward that is still learning how to say goodbye.