Gachagua: Pawn or master of his own downfall in Kenya's power struggle?

Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua. [File, Standard]

What is it about this man, Rigathi Gachagua, that the political class so passionately wants him out of the way? Pronouncements by the umpires of the National Assembly at two separate public events, two weeks ago, were the clearest indicators that Kenya’s Deputy President was a man under siege that would be difficult to survive.  

Even before the impeachment motion was formally brought before the Assembly, Speaker Moses Wetang’ula, and his deputy, Gladys Boss Shollei, told Kenyans that Gachagua must go. Wetang’ula accused him of reckless bravado, while Shollei talked of gross disrespect for President William Ruto. Gachagua was, meanwhile, on the stumps, prosecuting the matter in the court of public opinion. He was frontally taking on his boss, with bare knuckles. Thrown into the mix was a section of politically deep-heeled MPs from Gachagua’s native Mt Kenya region.  

What initially looked like a fight for supremacy in Mt Kenya spilt over to the rest of the country. Political gadflies began baying for Gachagua’s blood from all the four corners of the republic. And on Tuesday, October 8, an unprecedented 281 MPs overwhelmingly voted for impeachment. In another move, with the smell of disaster for the DP, Senate Speaker, Amason Kingi, has barred Senators from leaving the country while the matter is before the Senate. The Senate is the next arbitrator, beginning this Tuesday, with the vote expected on Thursday.  

In essence, the Senate Speaker is, curiously, whipping the Senators. Ordinarily, he would remain in the referee’s regular equidistant space. He would let the normal ebb and flow of Senate business take its course. Matters of quorum would rest with the two whips in the House.

Accordingly, the big question is, why does Kenya’s political top brass want to eat Gachagua alive? Is he so loathsome, so irredeemably wretched that he must be destroyed? Apart from seeking his removal from office, the motion seeks to permanently condemn the man to permanent official perdition. He will never hold public office again if he is impeached. Is he that odious, or does he just have the Curse of Cain? Have the gods conspired to destroy the man called Rigathi Gachagua? But if he has the Curse of Cain, does he also have the Mark of Cain?  

The chance of the snowball surviving in the scorching bonfires of hell is what appears to be the fate of Kenya’s Number Two. Gachagua’s rise in Kenya’s turbulent political arena has been at once meteoric and melodramatic. From various middle-level positions in the public service, in the late 1980s, Gachagua transited through sundry mega business opportunities and deals, to serve a single term in Parliament. After that, he was catapulted very fast into the Presidency, as Ruto’s deputy. By the same token, his fortunes are today plummeting so fast. Nothing seems capable of saving him, barring the hand of God. How could one rise so swiftly, only to go into unbridled free fall, so soon after? Is he paying the price for culpable hubris, or was it just written in the stars?  

Tribal chieftains

English Historian Edward Gibbon (1707–1770) wrote of the rise, decline and fall of great men in the words, “The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves.”

Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua flanked by other politicians arrives at the National Assembly Building to defend himself against an impeachment motion over gross misconduct. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

Gachagua has been condemned by those with the same fatal disorders that define him. His name could be replaced on the charge sheet with any other name, and everything would fit perfectly well. They say he is a tribal chieftain. His utterances in public point to that.

But so do theirs, too, almost without exception. The appointments they make have mapped them out as tribal chieftains who also practice nepotism. Even as the impeachment process is going on, tribe-based canvassing and jostling to replace Gachagua is already going on.  

He has been condemned of a sudden astronomical rise of financial fortunes. But this characteristic is the lowest common definition of the Kenya Kwanza National Executive. Their fortunes have risen to stratospheric heights like outer space spacecraft.  They say he is rude. He disrespects MPs, women, the courts and, in fact, everybody. It would be difficult to find the person to cast the first stone if Kenya was a conscientious nation.  

Gibbon reminds us that those who mirror people whom they are swift to condemn “can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.” Hence, having defined such gaps, the representatives of the Kenyan people in the National Assembly have gone for the kill. The political guns were fast and lethal on Tuesday. They put little store in Gachagua’s pleadings of innocence. Some didn’t even bother to listen to him. Especially not after he jumped the gun, to prosecute his case at a live press conference, the previous evening. An MP who spoke to this writer quipped, “We were not interested in his useless speech and self-justification. We knew what we had come to do. We had a duty to send him home. Some of us even slept as he read his things, while others made phone calls from the washrooms.”  

Gachagua’s goose was cooked ab initio. His case before the Assembly was an open and closed affair. The scenario is very unlikely to be different in the Senate, despite the restlessness that is beginning to drive fear into Mount Kenya MPs over this affair. The happenings on the ground in this region suggest that if Gachagua’s Curse of Cain ends his political career, his Mark of Cain will -conversely – bring down many careers in the Mountain. Those who set out to destroy Cain may not see the inside of Parliament again after August 2027.  

Accordingly, the impeachment of DP Gachagua comes as a double-edged sword. It will destroy Cain and those who destroy him in the Mt Kenya region. In Nakuru, on Friday, a team led by Governor Susan Kihika had a taste of things to come. They had a difficult time with the public when they mentioned President Ruto’s name at a funeral. Kihika, especially, just about managed to read the President’s message to the bereaved family. The danger of these people being rejected by the electorate is real. Yet, they have a job to do, at the behest of the powers that be, for the command is from on high. They must do what they have to do. Aware of this, Gachagua has himself told Kenyans, “You cannot bring up a motion to impeach the Deputy President without a nod from the President.” 

Obsession with mountain

So what went wrong between Kenya’s DP and his boss? As Gibbon suggests, Gachagua has done nothing new. His biggest sin, in the catalogue of accusations, has been the two-pronged matter of his loud public obsession with the welfare of the Mt Kenya people (Murima), and his tactless, almost disrespectful taking on of the boss in the open. This man, Gachagua, is the incarnation of the trite expression that you can take the villager out of the village, but you cannot take the village out of him.  

Born in a Mau Mau family in 1965, Gachagua attended low-profile schools that circumscribed him in short-sighted and narrow rural community life. His days in Kabiruini Primary School, and later Kianyaga High School, lacked the broadness of spectrum to prepare him to fit snugly in cosmopolitan milieus.

He was not prepared to comfortably embrace the diversity that such culturally varied and sophisticated landscapes dictate. He remains the archetypal African villager, evincing jovial village niceness with ease. It is the insensitive and indelicate awkward comfort of the socially underexposed and unsophisticated. He is educated, without being polished and socially erudite.  

With his village innocence and jovial ease, he could easily smile into the barrel of a loaded and cocked rifle, pointing at his forehead. He could cheerfully ask the gunman, “And what is this thing that you are holding in your hands?”  Such, indeed, has been his approach to the scores of political guns pointing at him. He has treated them with village smiles that grossly irritate the gunmen.  

But Gachagua’s bucolic habits and inclinations were manifest in his early adulthood. His most significant early encounter with the world outside the Mountain was in his undergraduate years, at the University of Nairobi (1985–1988). Here, he quickly sought, and equally quickly got, the inward-looking Chair of the Nyeri District University Students Association. Instructively, his future boss, Ruto, was also a freshman at Nairobi, when Gachagua was in his final year at Kenya’s premier university. There are no indications, however, that their paths crossed at this time. But if both arrived at this fountain of knowledge from rural backgrounds, one developed city street wisdom that has made him Kenya’s national CEO, while the other one remained a country boy, ever yearning for his village.  

His rural naivety is at once Gachagua’s foremost asset with his people and his Waterloo everywhere else. He is extremely at ease with the unsophisticated countrified populations in the Mountain region. He belts out, in a thunderous bass-baritone, messages that sink into the very bloodstream of these people.

Even in the most challenging situations, his rich Gikuyu idiom, his domestic imagery, and his heavy Gikuyu accent, all combine with his jovial nature, to drive home the message. It was these rural assets that made him more believable than President Uhuru Kenyatta, when the two led opposing sides in the 2022 Presidential election campaigns in the region, for Ruto, and ODM leader Raila Odinga, respectively.

Put together with his legendary financial wherewithal, Gachagua’s connectivity with the people won him Ruto’s favour as running mate. His colleagues in Parliament were hesitant about this choice, though. It was partly because he was only a first-term MP. There were more seasoned politicians in the camp, ordinarily with a better claim to the ticket. But they lacked Gachagua’s village charm, and his financial kitty, to boot. His tour of duty and his stint in business has been said to have lined his pockets, although there has been no proof.  

Unfulfilled promises

Reluctantly, they accepted Ruto’s choice. And the rest is now history that has led us to where we are today. Those who say that they know claim that this money was critical for the Ruto campaign. In return, “Gachagua was promised business opportunities” that would help him “recover” his “investment” in the election. They claim that the boss has since swept this “promise” into the dustbin of history. The rural boy who lives inside Gachagua cannot understand this turn of events, hence the boldness with which he takes on his boss in public, asking him “to honour your promises, Mister President.”  

At that time, the rustic deputy presidential candidate reminded the country – and especially President Uhuru – that he was the scion of a Mau Mau family. This fitted in snugly with President Ruto’s campaign refrain of “hustlers versus dynasties.” The dynasties were cast as the enemies of the people. It was a foil to the struggle for the return of Kikuyu land, stolen by Europeans. Gachagua also accused the dynasties of stealing Kenya’s independence and going on to enrich themselves at the poor people’s expense. President Uhuru and his candidate Odinga epitomized such hated dynasties.  

The Mountain heard Gachagua loud and clear. After Ruto and Gachagua romped home, the DP forgot that it was time to change the tune. He failed to understand that the tectonic plates had shifted. Ruto was now his boss. It was not going to be smiles, laughter and patting the boss at the back as usual. Friendship had ended, it was now a “Yes, Sir” and “No, Sir,” season. Besides, while they had run on a joint ticket, there was only one centre of power; President Ruto. Once again, Gachagua did not understand the basic law of how to behave around power. 

President William Ruto and his Deputy Rigathi Gachagua.[File, Standard]

Gachagua did not pick up any lessons from the messy relationship between his boss and President Uhuru, in the regime they had just replaced. But it would seem he was goaded on by the unwritten promises they had reached on his financial investment in the Ruto election, and the future. In all his public pronouncements, therefore, he sounded like a co-president. He literally had bought shares in the government, and he kept reminding everyone about this, even in the President’s presence at public events. He carried his shares talisman on his sleeve and it was bound to expose and harm him.  

Meaningful friendships

But Gachagua’s other fatal flaw has been his failure to make any meaningful friendships outside the Mt Kenya region. Apart from the embattled Cleophas Malala, who has served as UDA Party Secretary-General, no other names come to mind as Gachagua’s political allies, or even just as plain friends, outside his home turf. Yet, even within that turf, he has not been sufficiently tactful to carry everyone along, without appearing to be bossy. If the youthful population in Parliament today has not been keen to work with him in the region, he has failed to take advantage of senior Kikuyu politicians, whom Ruto purged from the political mainstream in the flawed Jubilee primaries of 2017. Ruto replaced these people with political fledglings, who owed him huge personal allegiance. The seasoned politicians now in the cold of Mt Kenya remain a gigantic asset to tap into. 

Yet the biggest mistake for Gachagua was probably accepting to be a part of the UDA party, instead of taking into the Kenya Kwanza coalition his own party. Once again, he failed to read from the UhuRuto experience. If he was in an inter-party formation with his boss, perhaps – but just perhaps – he would still have a majority of Mt Kenya MPs behind him?

Ruto understands how precarious working with senior politicians who have their parties is. He has, accordingly, been keen to dissolve Kenya Kwanza coalition parties. Gachagua’s case is a lesson galore for the political class, however. You don’t approach that landscape with naïve village friendliness, sacks of money and trust. President Ruto understood the Italian Renaissance philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1512). He advises princes to destroy those who help them to ascend to power, and to embrace those who don’t think he owes them anything. Those to whom the prince owes gratitude will pester him all the time, asking him to keep his promises.

The ODM squad that Ruto owes nothing to is more likely to be grateful to him than those who helped him ascend to power. Gachagua must, accordingly, go with his alleged money bags, and his numerous votes from the village.

There will be others in the future. But Ruto also remembers what Machiavelli has said in The Prince, “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” Gachagua must be destroyed.