Party of National Unity

The Party of National Unity (PNU) is a political party in Kenya originally founded as a political coalition. On 16 September 2007, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki announced the party formation and said that he would run as its presidential candidate in the December 2007 Kenyan elections. It has since become a political party in its own right following conditions set by the Political Parties Act, passed in Kenya in 2008. Recently PNU has launched activities to revamp itself ahead of the 2022 general elections. Overview The PNU started out as a coalition of several parties, including the KANU, Narc-Kenya, Ford-Kenya, Ford-People, Democratic Party, Shirikisho, National Alliance Party of Kenya and others. President Mwai Kibaki was to be the only personal member of PNU besides the corporate membership through the affiliated parties. The PNU was created shortly before the elections that were held in December 2007. Until the beginning of September it was not clear on which party's ticket the president was going to run. In the 2002 elections, Kibaki ran as the candidate of the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), which had since split. The erstwhile original NARC was legally in the hands of its chairperson Charity Ngilu who showed no inclination of siding with Kibaki for a renewed bid. Kibaki's allies had already pulled out of NARC and founded NARC-Kenya which was not on good terms with a number of important politicians in Kibaki's government of national unity which had seen the intake of erstwhile opposition figures since 2005 who held on to their parties like KANU or Ford-Kenya. 2007 elections Poor political preparation of the new party became obvious in the process of nomination for parliamentary seats. Initially, PNU member parties agreed to field parliamentary and civic candidates under PNU, except KANU, which was permitted to field its own candidates. However, this agreement failed to materialise. As a result, some candidates, mainly from Kibaki's former Democratic Party, contested under the PNU ticket and others under their respective parties. In a number of constituencies PNU-affiliated candidates were contesting against each other for the same parliamentary seat. The PNU fared poorly in the parliamentary elections of 2007, reaching only 43 seats against nearly 99 for its main rival, the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM).