You know him as one of the sought-after lawyers and governance experts who grace your TV for political shows.
However, lawyer Steve Ogolla’s story of grass to grace is one of resilience and hard work until he got to the peak of his profession.
He sat down with us for an interview at the Kempinski Hotel, which is a stark contrast to where he grew up in abject poverty.
“The Steve Ogolla people see in the media is not the same one people have grown up knowing. You don’t just emerge from nowhere, you work hard to get where you are,” Ogolla said.
Born in Ugenya, Siaya county, Ogolla grew up in a polygamous family, with his mother being the first wife. He had two-step mums and has 18 siblings.
Ogolla describes his upbringing as desolate, saying they could not even afford a meal most times and poverty led to his siblings dropping out of school in primary school to do menial jobs.
“When I see a mother in Mombasa boiling stones, I can relate because my mother would sometimes buy sugarcane, which she gave us to chew for dinner. It was a very desperate life,” the lawyer says.
Since his mother did not go to school and also his elder siblings, Ogolla as a second-last born did not have anyone to inspire him growing up because even his siblings had dropped out of primary school.
However, through his determination and hard work, he was the first and only person in his family to break that cycle by completing primary education transition to high school and proceeding to university.
Ogolla, a born-again Christian, says his education journey was full of struggles. He sat the KSCE exam three times, was a hawker in Kisumu and Nairobi, and at one time sold chicken on campus.
When I see a mother in Mombasa boiling stones, I can relate because my mother would sometimes buy sugarcane, which she gave us to chew for dinner. It was a very desperate life
Steve Ogolla
ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
A head boy in primary school, Ogolla was also a top student. He sat his KCPE exam in 1997 and passed.
He was admitted to St Mary’s School Yala but because his family could not afford fees, his primary school teachers, who had seen his potential, paid his form one fees.
“I was in Yala in 1998 and the next year, I didn’t go back for lack of school fees. I stayed in Kibera with my elder brother,” he says.
Even though he missed school that whole year, he would borrow notes from his friends in high school.
In 2000, with the help of his former primary school teachers, he enrolled at a day school in Ugenya in Form 3 and sat the KCSE exam in 2001, scoring a B-.
He had hoped for a B plain to be able to join university, but since he could not afford a private university, he spent 2002 doing odd jobs in Kisumu.
The next year, he moved to Nairobi and got a job that involved hawking merchandise like calculators and organizers in offices within the CBD.
“I would walk from Kayole to the City Centre, all the way to Riverside Drive through the UoN to pick the merchandise that I would hawk,” Ogolla says.
In the course of that year, he met a friend who advised him to register for his exams so he could hawk during the day and read at night for the exams.
For his second attempt, he enrolled at a school in Siaya. He continued hawking in Nairobi and in November that year, he sat the exams.
When the results were out, he scored a B plain, missing the university entry mark for regular students by one point.
Feeling frustrated, he went to Mombasa and got different odd jobs, which included offloading ships at the port and selling fruit salad.
In December 2004, he decided to move back to Ugenya with a view of opening a kinyozi and video shop because he felt frustrated by city life and wanted a quiet, simple life in the village.