Who is David Masaku Munyau?
September 2026
David Masaku Munyau represents Mutomo ward, in Kitui South constituency, on the Kitui County Assembly – and belongs to a genuinely small group: one of only four MCAs, out of 40 across the entire county, who was re-elected in 2022 rather than losing his seat in that year’s near-total turnover. He ran on a Jubilee Party ticket both times, polling 5,034 votes in 2022 according to the IEBC's gazetted results for Kitui County.
Surviving a countywide wave that removed 36 of 40 sitting MCAs is a distinction very few of Masaku’s colleagues share, and it places him alongside a small handful of other re-elected representatives – including Nguutani’s Stephen Katana – whose voters judged their first terms worth extending when the overwhelming majority of Kitui’s wards chose entirely new faces instead.
Masaku’s visible development record includes direct engagement with water infrastructure delivered through international partnership rather than county funding alone. In September 2022, he attended the commissioning of the Mbunyaka Rock Catchment water project in Kawelu village, Mutomo/Kibwea ward – an 8 million shilling project funded by the German NGO WeltHungerHilfe and expected to serve more than 850 households. He appeared at the event alongside the county’s Water executive and the county director for Water, signalling an MCA actively present for infrastructure his ward received through a non-governmental partner rather than treating it as someone else’s achievement to merely applaud from a distance.
That kind of coordination between a ward MCA and an international development partner matters because NGO-funded infrastructure in Kitui typically still requires local political engagement to succeed – identifying genuine need, supporting community buy-in, and ensuring a completed project is actually used and maintained rather than left to fall into disrepair once the funding partner moves on. An MCA present and visible at the commissioning, rather than absent from a project his ward directly benefited from, signals the kind of follow-through that keeps donor-funded infrastructure functioning after the ribbon-cutting.
Masaku’s engagement has continued into 2026. In July, he accompanied County Assembly Speaker Kevin Kinengo on a tour of national government development projects in Mutomo, alongside Kitui South MP Dr. Rachael Kaki Nyamai – the kind of joint county-national oversight visit that keeps an MCA directly informed about projects funded outside the county’s own budget but still landing in his ward, and visibly connected to both levels of government his constituents depend on.
Mutomo sits within Kitui South, one of the county’s larger constituencies by registered voters, where water scarcity is a persistent and defining development challenge given the area’s semi-arid conditions. An MCA whose visible record spans both a completed NGO-funded water project for hundreds of households and ongoing engagement with national government infrastructure touring suggests a representative working multiple channels simultaneously to bring resources into a ward, rather than depending on any single funding source or political relationship alone.
Re-election itself is a form of evidence that shouldn’t be discounted, particularly given the scale of the 2022 anti-incumbent wave across Kitui. Voters choosing to extend an MCA’s mandate when the overwhelming majority of their neighbouring wards did the opposite suggests Masaku’s first term produced results Mutomo residents were unwilling to gamble away for an untested alternative – a judgment his subsequent, continued visibility at both NGO-funded and national government project sites appears consistent with rather than contradicting.
Rock catchment water systems like the one commissioned in Kawelu village are particularly well suited to Kitui South’s terrain, capturing and storing rainwater runoff from natural rock surfaces during the rainy season for use through drier months – infrastructure that, once properly maintained, can serve a community for years without requiring the ongoing fuel or electricity costs that piped or pumped systems often demand in areas without reliable power access. For a ward like Mutomo, where the underlying constraint on daily life is rarely the absence of ambition but the absence of dependable water, a project of this kind addresses the problem at its root rather than treating a symptom of it.
