A question can be asked, is what we are witnessing playing out between President William Ruto and Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua for real or is it all a game to accomplish a mutual objective?
This question crossed my mind when all this drama started unfolding, but I quickly dismissed it because the falling out was just too quick and almost out-of-the-blue to have been choreographed by the two leaders.
The speed with which the fallout has unfolded, and now to the point of openly discussing whether Gachagua should be impeached, points to something one-sided and, no doubt, Gachagua was blindsided.
As Gachagua lamented on television in his public plea to Ruto to spare him, the acrimony between retired President Uhuru Kenyatta and Ruto did not happen until after Ruto completed the first term as deputy president.
The question Gachagua did not answer was why the split between Uhuru and Ruto did not happen during the duo’s first term.
For those who have forgotten — or were too young then to know — Uhuru and Ruto were united to take the presidency in 2013, courtesy of their invitation to defend against serious criminal charges leveled against them at the ICC.
The duo so effectively used the invitation and, coupled with other factors no need to get into, they were sworn into office after the Supreme Court dismissed Raila and AfriCog’s challenge — a decision that towers in our country’s history as the worst ever handed down by the apex court, and nothing else could possibly ever come close.
Be that as it were, Uhuru and Ruto set off on their first term as two best friends joined at the hip and even wore matching shirts and ties to make the point, to Raila Odinga and his still-crying supporters’ chagrin.
However, as it would emerge long after the honeymoon was over, and while Uhuru was asleep at the wheel, Ruto mounted a stealth campaign to ingratiate himself in Uhuru’s backyard in the spirit of ‘kumi kumi’.
Even with this as the working model and arrangement between Uhuru and Ruto, Ruto would not sit around and wait for Uhuru to make him president after Uhuru’s 10 years.
Rather, Ruto carefully plotted his own pathway, essentially rendering Uhuru irrelevant in that quest. By the time Uhuru and his men woke up to the reality, it was too late.
But they had to do something, and this something was to try to cut Ruto down to size at the minimum or politically neuter him.
That’s when Uhuru publicly denounced Ruto’s moves and called his travelling around the country ‘tanga tanga’, or idling around.
By then, the seed to finish Mt Kenya politically was well on the ground, and none other than the brothers and sisters from Mt Kenya helped germinate the seed, which grew, not exactly to a mugumo tree, but something close to it, represented by a wheelbarrow.
The one pushing that wheelbarrow was none other than Ruto himself. Just as the pusher of a wheelbarrow dumps the contents onto a pile, Ruto is poised to do the same by dumping Gachagua and his followers onto a heap of discarded items/people - used and dumped - we know all too well as a staple in Kenyan politics, a government officer taking a bribe.
The million-dollar question is, whether Gachagua, like Ruto during Uhuru’s failed efforts, can find a way to turn things around, jettison Ruto from pushing the wheelbarrow, and turn the tables on him?
In the short term, no. When the fallout between Uhuru and Ruto began around 2017, there was talk of trying to impeach Ruto, just as there is talk of impeaching Gachagua, though not as loudly and forcefully.
The difference is that Ruto already had enough MPs in his pocket, and whatever else he needed in numbers, to beat an impeachment motion, he had the money or means to buy those votes.
Through his footsoldiers, Gachagua dares his enemies to bring on the impeachment motion.
Ironically, the only two people who can save Gachagua are the two people he offended the most: Uhuru and Raila. Neither has a compelling reason to help him and every reason not to.