I doubt if there is any Kenyan who has not been asked by friends and family over the last week or so, this question: “What do you think will happen to the Deputy President?”
What we have in the proposed impeachment of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, is a first-class political drama that has transfixed even those Kenyans who ordinarily are not obsessed with politics.
So let me add my thoughts to this discussion since I suspect that what I write this week will be impatiently set aside by most readers, if it does not touch on this red-hot topic.
My view is really quite simple: that what we are seeing here is democracy at work.
And that we should be grateful that we live in a reasonably democratic country, and not in an absolutist or authoritarian state, or one of the many unstable countries where differences of opinion at the top of the political pyramid easily lead to civil war.
Also bear in mind that during his first term as President of the United States, Donald Trump was impeached twice, by the US House of Representatives (in 2019 and then again in 2021).
And in both cases, it was at the subsequent trial conducted by the US Senate that President Trump was acquitted.
I would say therefore that insofar as we have had a number of governors endure an impeachment process; and since we adopted the US presidential system when we gave ourselves a new constitution in 2010; it was always just a matter of time before either a president or a deputy president was subject to impeachment proceedings. But the US is not the only country we have to consider here.
There is Sudan, where what is effectively a disagreement between the two most powerful men in the country – General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the army, and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who leads the Rapid Support Forces militia – has spiralled into a full-scale civil war.
Before that, in South Sudan, the differences between President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar (currently serving as the First Vice President of South Sudan) had also led to what amounted to a civil war.
So when the deep political cleavage that has been revealed to exist between President William Ruto and DP Gahcagua, now produces the epic drama of an impeachment process, we should be grateful rather than disturbed.
One aspect of democracy which does not usually receive the credit due to it, is that at some level, democracy is mostly a dispute resolution mechanism.
Democracy presupposes a clash not only of opinions, but of interests as well.
And even then, not only differences between individuals but between communities, ideological groupings and ethnicities.
Given these circumstances, we surely need a mechanism for settling our disagreements within a peaceful and widely accepted context.
And to ensure that we stick to the letter of the law, and not the whims of temporarily powerful individuals, we have the independent court system as the final arbiter.
What I am getting at here is that these political dramas come and go – and the country moves on just the same.
I wonder how many readers will have a clear recollection of just how dramatic and exciting the ‘Building Bridges Initiative’ was a few years ago.
This was a political process that was intended to bring about a fundamental change in the governance structures of Kenya, with power more broadly dispersed, devolution enhanced, etc.
It proposed the introduction of an Office of the Prime Minister (with two deputies); an Office of the Official Leader of the Opposition; and various other modifications of the official power structure, basically intended to ensure that future elections would end up with as many regional political kingpins as possible accommodated within the government.
The BBI was overwhelmingly popular at the level of the county governments, where the MCAs voted in support of the initiative.
But in the end, the Judiciary declared it to be unconstitutional, and with that the drama ended, and the BBI sank without a trace.