On Sunday night, former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua was on live TV, for the umpteenth time.
His appearance on the show was intended largely to condemn the attacks on him at a funeral in Limuru on Thursday last week, and predictably, label the incident an assassination attempt.
But as expected, it turned into a monologue session, as he attempted to highlight the alleged clean-man credentials he possessed, which, in his view, led to his being forced out of government.
The overriding take-away from the interview was that Gachagua had been on the Road to Damascus, whereupon he has converted into the greatest human rights defender since Martin Luther King Jnr.
He listed the ills in government that he had opposed while serving in the regime, pointing out that none in the Cabinet had the wherewithal to oppose President Ruto but him.
He mentioned the Adani deals and the over-taxation of citizens as among the issues he and the President had disagreed over, and repeatedly condemned the use of criminal gangs to manage politics.
Talking of which, Gachagua’s own self-declared clean man image may delude him into thinking the country collectively has a short memory, but it was just last year, during the Azimio protests (dubbed “Maandamano”), when he practically egged on both the police and shadowy figures calling themselves “Nairobi Business Community”, to visit untold violence on anti-government protesters.
During the protests, President Ruto was out of the country, and Gachagua, as DP would share clips of himself, arriving in the office at dawn, ostensibly to “handle” the Azimio “nuisance” each day.
Around the same time, a brazen and unprecedented invasion of the Northlands Ranch, belonging to the Kenyatta family happened in which property was destroyed and prime sheep stolen, by gangs that appeared oblivious of the value of sheep they bore on their shoulders like sacks of charcoal.
At this time, Gachagua’s rhetoric, sometimes bordering on the bizarre, against the first family, was cranked up a notch higher, which served to incite the impunity witnessed at Northlands.
In a way therefore, his condemnation of political gangs is pure hypocrisy. Having said that, one must acknowledge the game plan of the former DP, programmed in such a way as to cause mass anger against the regime, before being weaponised as an electoral tool ahead of the 2027 election.
But I submit that Ruto the administration has nothing to worry about as far as Gachagua is concerned.
First, I believe that merely riding on public disenchantment, for a whole three years, is in itself unsustainable as a political philosophy.
Unlike, say, former liberation heroes from the community like Jomo Kenyatta, Kenneth Matiba, Charles Rubia and Dedan Kimathi, among others, Gachagua forgets to rally the community around shared ideals and desires, instead of his perceived persecution by the Ruto regime as the uniting issue.
I am certain that he will soon realise that personal ambitions and problems do not quite make for long-term political mobilisation points.
In fact, since history forms a free political lesson, the ex-DP can simply educate himself on which communal issues informed the agitation by the mentioned liberation heroes, and how these issues united the region for long.
A personality cult may not necessarily work for long around the mountain. Besides, to run a credible and sustainable opposition to a sitting government in Kenya and Africa requires a leader whose own integrity, like Caesar’s wife, must be above reproach.
At the transition from the Uhuru regime to Ruto’s, the former Mathira MP had court cases that his new position seemingly helped to sweep off.
And even without that, the catalogue of accusations in his impeachment motion suggested that the powers that be already had an eye on the sources of his wealth.
This is before you add the uncomfortable fact that criminal investigations have already cited aides from his former office for the funding and organisation of the June Gen Z protests.
The foregoing paints a picture of a Gachagua who will soon find his hands full in the corridors of justice, rather than running around causing political havoc.
While at it, he will be too aware that as the newest opposition figure in town, the role doesn’t mix very well with his remaining income stream as a businessman.
The sad case of Matiba, which demonstrates just how far a regime can go to destroy one’s businesses, must be fresh in his mind.
Opposition work requires lots of money for mobilisation and sustenance, but works only when an individual retains back channels in government to mint money here and there, a phenomenon that doesn’t match with Gachagua’s scorched earth policy against Ruto and the Kenya Kwanza regime.
There is another problem that the former DP will have to contend with. Regional mobilisation is generally the easy part.
But to win national election, he would have to persuade other regions to partner with him.
Yet the image that comes out of the current anti-Ruto anger that he is riding on, paints the Mount Kenya region as entitled people, whose agitation for change only happens when one of their own isn’t occupying State House.
Essentially, the problems within the region may be the same in nature, over the years, but under the five presidents the country has had thus far, the region has predictably only found its anti-government voice during the Moi and the Ruto regimes.
It doesn’t do much for coalition building. Perhaps this also a good enough time remind the government itself that throwing plastic chairs at the former DP, however tame the “assassination attempt” may be, serves no real political interest.
On the contrary, if the government makes it its mission to perform and deliver for the people, it would have nothing to fear from characters like Gachagua.
I am not saying that people in government instigated the attack in Limuru, and I obviously have no idea who did.
But the surest way to make a fading politician, who has lost a “big flag”, popular and appealing to the grassroots, is for the security services, even if not complicit, to allow the harassment of the former Mathira MP during public functions.
At any rate, there is a universal acknowledgement that the face of the voter in Kenya is evolving.
Even though they were only powerful for a fleeting moment, the Gen Z helped launch the feeling that young people can rally around national issues beyond tribe and region.
And if these young people turn out in large numbers at the ballot, they will make nonsense of the preferred tribal mobilisation method of Kenyan politicians, like Gachagua.
Essentially therefore, the impeached DP may camp in his tribal base mounting what he perceives to be a monumental challenge against Ruto’s second term, before being rudely awakened to the reality of a detribalised voting population in many parts of the country, unwilling to play ball with the old style.
If all these factors work in harmony, as I envisage, I am persuaded that
the anticipated three-year Gachagua
assault on the state, fashioned on the
same template as DP Ruto against
President Uhuru between 2018 and
2022, is not sustainable and will die
a natural death, not least because
Gachagua now has no powerful flag
to shield him from the vagaries of
anti-establishment politics.
