Granton Graham Samboja is a Kenyan politician and media executive who served as the second governor of Taita Taveta County from 2017 to 2022.
Samboja's education background is the subject of controversy, but an online news outlet reports that he attended the state-owned Kenya Institute of Mass Communication (KIMC).
Electoral law as applied in the 2017 general elections explicitly stated that a candidate for governor should have had a degree from a university recognized in Kenya.
In July 2019, Governor Granton Samboja initiated a petition to have President Uhuru Kenyatta dissolve the county assembly of Taita Taveta.
[8] In October 2019, Samboja's petition was handed over to President Uhuru Kenyatta who then forwarded it to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) for verification of the petitioners’ signatures.
In this particular case, the petition needed at least 15,500 verified signatures because the total number of registered voters in Taita Taveta County was 155,000.
[10] On 6 November 2019, IEBC announced that Samboja's petition had the support of 21,861 registered voters, confirming that it had met the required threshold.
Officials of the Taita Taveta county government say lost revenue due to the border disputes could be as much as 60 million Kenya Shillings annually.
The agreement to resolve a border dispute at Rongo was signed by Samboja and Kajiado county governor Joseph Ole Lenku.
[19] Governor Granton Samboja inherited a public health system plagued by years of chronic underfunding, corruption and workers’ strikes.
The reason given by doctors and nurses for the numerous strikes is failure by county governments to implement Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs) with their respective unions.
[20] One of the first programs in Governor Granton Samboja's administration was to upgrade the open air markets in Taita Taveta county.
Similar market upgrading projects in Wundanyi, Mwatate and Taveta towns resulted in huge losses to the business community.
[26] In July 2019, Governor Samboja was among politicians summoned by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to record statements over his remarks amidst clashes between Somali herders and local farmers.
[29] Samboja has several times reiterated his stand that Taita Taveta county must get a bigger share of revenue from Tsavo National Park.
[31] The economic bloc, known in Swahili as the Jumuiya ya Kaunti za Pwani (JKP), consists of the six counties at the Kenyan coast.