Gachagua barks at Opposition rivals while Ruto waits for spoils

Former DP Rigathi Gachagua. [DPCS]

The alphabet of life does not change, this is the big lesson for Kenya’s Opposition chiefs. They ride against the tide of this philosophy at their own risk and peril. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs. Our elementary school teachers taught us that this was the way of life.

The 26 letters of the Roman alphabet were embedded in this simple sentence. The philosophy in the alphabet is timeless. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs. The tense is different, but both the alphabet and the philosophy remain. It is not just about chanting and singing the Latin ABCD, and all that. It is about the rules of life. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs. Nature abhors weakness. The limping gazelle shall be eaten. Yet, the lion and the fox should also watch whom they eat. Often, they outfox the dogs, but also perish.   

And so it is, too, with the fox called Rigathi Gachagua and Kenya’s Opposition top dogs. The predatory political canine from Wamunyoro in  Mathira is outwitting the lazy dogs of Kenya’s Opposition politics. He came later. Yet, like Julius Caesar, he saw the space. He conquered it. In politics, as in football, you look for empty spaces and place the ball there. If you don’t see any, you make moves that create them. The ball is placed there to your advantage, all the way to the goal.

Your teammates matter, of course. But only to the extent that you are a champion team, and not a team of champions. If you are not a champion team, it’s every champion for himself. God takes care of you all. Nobody understands this alphabet of life better than Riggy G. He found Opposition chiefs napping in a political marketplace recently vacated by Raila Odinga, when Raila joined William Ruto in a broad-based affair.  And Riggy G took charge. He took off with a vengeance that is still going strong, only that it could be hurtling the Opposition down the cliff. 

Gachagua, especially, saw the yawning leadership gap in the Mt. Kenya region. Uhuru Kenyatta had retired. His Jubilee Party was smarting under the pain of stolen MPs. It was licking its wounds after William Ruto raided the Azimio coalition, ran away with Jubilee MPs and disorganized Uhuru’s party in Parliament. Jubilee was in the intensive care unit of the law courts, fighting for survival.

Martha Karua had pulled the Narc Kenya Party out of Azimio. Eugene Wamalwa’s Democratic Alliance Party (DAP) was undergoing ownership crises in Western Kenya, with two factions pulling in different directions. And Kalonzo Musyoka’s Wiper Democratic Front (WDF) was walking a slow-laid-back diplomatic corridor, cautious not to rub anybody the wrong way.

Then came Rigathi Gachagua, a politically wounded animal. He was bleeding and bedraggled in the murky aftermath of impeachment. He arrived full of blustery; bursting with bitter anger against Ruto, for casting him out of the Kenya Kwanza government.

His vindictive energy was loud and pulsating. Ruto must go. He formed a political party, the Democratic Citizens Party (DCP). Ruto Must Go became at once his goal and clarion call. Must Go became Ruto’s other name.  It remains so; yet does the search to remove Ruto sometimes get swallowed up by raw personal ambition? 

Today, the fox has Mt. Kenya region as his garrison. He has dwarfed every competitor here. He commands the fort with the iron fist of an unapologetic red-eyed dyed-in-the-wool despot. His ethnic ideology is undisguised and unyielding. He markets it with the relentless paranoia of a fanatical owner of the tribe, and the tenacity of a slave master. In the language of a post-medieval age European monarch, he is the Mountain and the Mountain is him. If you do not toe the straight and narrow path of this latter-day “Mwene Nyaga”, you are politically doomed.

Governor Irungu Kang’ata of Murang’a, despite all the great accomplishments he is making in the land of Queen Wangu Wa Makeri, has learned that there is a new monarch in the Mountain. Former senator Lenny Kivuti (Embu) and governor Peter Munya (Meru) are still processing this reality, with a sense of denial. Sailing in the same boat is former Attorney General, and Speaker of the National Assembly, Justin Muturi.

Rigathi is ordering about these senior politicos with the hubris of a king without a crown. He recently directed them to fold their parties and join the DCP, only to retreat when the heat became rather heavy. Other Opposition chiefs have been asked to retreat to their villages, to seek tribal support before imagining they could hold a conversation with him. He scoffs at individuals whom he says have no following. “So how will I negotiate with a solitary individual, who arrives like (the stem of) a tree?” he asks mirthfully.

That Gachagua could be the ultimate incarnation of unbridled political arrogance in Kenya is not in question. What is, rather, is the endgame. He often talks of himself as a presidential aspirant, seeking a joint Opposition ticket. Yet, he never leaves the Mountain. He has yet to learn the alphabet of  thinking beyond his place of birth. He is stuck to merchandising not just for Mt. Kenya region, but unabashedly for the Kikuyu.

He sees everything in the political space as competition among tribes. And he is the owner, king and protector of the Kikuyu. On the rare occasion when he should stray away from the Mountain, he will address his hosts in raw tribal idiom, “You, Waluhyia . . . You, Wajaluo  . . . Wakalenjin  . . .” Then he will move on to drive a wedge between Bantu speaking tribes and the rest, characterising non-Kikuyu Bantu speakers as his “cousins.”

Such is the man who nurses presidential ambition, an unapologetic ethnic supremacist and an absolute despot of sorts. Buoyed up by his party’s recent landslide victory in the Ol Kalou by-election, he now carries political vanity on the sleeve. His bold rhetoric exudes a huge sense of entitlement that must excite his supporters. Yet, is Gachagua reaching his reality check moment? Is it time for the Opposition as a whole to undertake a political audit, to establish where, exactly, the foxy Gachagua jumped over them, and where they are headed? Could they be handing Ruto a political lifeline called Rigathi Gachagua?

Their feeble whimpering about “ Gachagua’s arrogance” and sundry fishing for public sympathy will do Opposition chiefs little good. Of course Gachagua knows that is “arrogant”  and the knowledge does not bother him. Nor is he disturbed by the knowledge that he is William Ruto in a different guise. The difference between the two leaders is that one is a wolf under sheep’s clothing, while the other one is a forest dog that enjoys showing off his original coat. He proudly wears everything that he accuses Ruto and Kipchumba Murkomen of, “bloated ego, arrogance, impunity.”