Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua at the requiem service for the 21 school children who died in the Hillside Endarasha Academy fire.
Away from public show of bravado, Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua is not leaving anything to chance ahead of a crucial week that could seal his fate as the country’s deputy chief executive officer.
An aide coordinating the response team told Nation.Africa in confidence that they have since identified at least six action areas with resignation being one of them but only as the last resort.
They have prioritised what they are calling Samson option, the plan to bring the whole building (read Kenya Kwanza administration) tumbling down.
To Riggy G, as sometimes the second in command is referred to, he brought in a significant percentage of the votes from Mountain in the last elections and if he can’t be allowed to keep his position then even the president will go down with him.
It is a message Mr Gachagua pushed in his torus on Friday and Saturday.
“You will see a different DP, politically speaking. He will ensure the president for being complicit in this conspiracy does not have peace too,” the aide said.
This is twinned with the plan to keep the president and his allies busy fighting fires — eventually making the 2027 re-election bid a nightmare.
The team, which operates at the DP’s second floor offices of Harambee House Annex and sometimes from his private office in Karen has one clear mission: to assemble ammunition and analyse possible loopholes he will exploit to thwart the planned ouster.
Also, Mr Gachagua is employing scorched-earth policy especially in the Mt Kenya region. The idea is to turn the masses against any lawmaker who may be thinking of voting in support of impeachment in the event it makes it to the floor of the House.
This strategy by his politburo is already yielding fruit as a number of MPs initially vocal in their opposition of the ‘villager’ from Mathira had beaten a hasty retreat with some going quiet. The ground is becoming hostile for them.
“MPs are being mobilised to impeach me. If President William Ruto is tired of Mount Kenya, let him come here and tell us so. I am visiting Mount Kenya counties to ask Wanjiku (the people) if they are tired or disappointed with my work,” Mr Gachagua said in Mwea on Saturday.
“We are in Mwea (Kirinyaga), Meru and Embu this weekend to tell our people how their son is being mistreated in this marriage,” the aide said.
Part of the goal is to ring-fence the mountain and use the bloc as a bargaining chip if necessary. Whoever then wants to work with the region in the clamour for national leadership must then go through Mr Gachagua.
His handlers have a better way to capture this, nobody gets to the Mountain without going through Riggy G—s who is consolidating his position as the regional kingpin.
Mr Gachagua is, however, waiting with bated breath for the President’s next course of action with reports that those keen on kicking him out are waiting for the nod from the head of state. Dr Ruto was expected back in the country this weekend after attending the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.
He’s expected to chair a Parliamentary Group (PG) of the ruling coalition early in the week to offer guidance on the matter. It would be interesting to see if Mr Gachagua will attend or if he will be invited to a meeting meant to decide his fate.
And should the impeachment motion come before the House for debate and vote, Mr Gachagua is working on denying the movers the needed numbers to push it through. Wiper party leader Kalonzo Musyoka and his DAP-K counterpart Eugene Wamalwa have already pledged support even as Mr Gachagua reaches out to a number of ODM MPs said to be unhappy with the plot.
“We are solidly behind Rigathi,” Mr Wamalwa told Nation Africa.
“As ‘government-in-waiting’, we will not allow these distractions, including an impeachment motion against the Deputy President,” Mr Musyoka said three days ago even as it emerges that he chaired a National Executive Committee at Maanzoni in Machakos County on Friday to whip his party members to defend the DP.
Wiper has 25 MPs in the National Assembly while DAP-K has five. Those pushing for the impeachment must marshal 233 MPs or two thirds of the House to vote in its favour and the motion must be supported by one third of the House or 117 MPs.
Makueni Senator Daniel Maanzo, a member of Wiper, holds that there are no grounds to impeach Mr Gachagua. He says that should the National Assembly make good its threat to send the Deputy President home, then they will save him in court.
“If he doesn’t survive at the Senate, then the courts will save him. So far, I have not seen any grounds for sending him home,” Mr Maanzo said.
“Just saying murima (mountain) is not a ground for impeachment. Yes, the DP might have been previously reckless with his words but we all do that at some point. In any case, he said the truth that this is a shareholder government,” Mr Maanzo added
Mr Gachagua and Mr Musyoka, himself a former Vice President, are exploring modalities of working together ahead of the next elections should the rocky political marriage with Dr Ruto prove irreparable. In fact, to incorporate Mr Musyoka’s Kamba nation, Mr Gachagua says the ‘A’ in Gema now stands for Akamba making it Gikuyu, Embu, Meru Akamba association.
He also has another prayer, that ODM leader Raila Odinga’s bid for the chairmanship of the African Union Commission (AUC) that the president is leading the campaign flops. That way, they team up with Mr Odinga and any like-minded individuals in 2027 to avenge his ‘mistreatment and betrayal’.
The fourth strand is to rope in as many key players as he can to dissuade the president from okaying his removal. The Gachagua camp has unleashed Kikuyu elders and other cultural leaders to voice their opposition to the plan. The Church is also another cog
Mr Gachagua is hoping will help him convince Dr Ruto to call a ceasefire.
Related, the DP is understood to have reached out to the Western embassies in Nairobi to intercede for him.
Aware that the West is keen to avoid a repeat of the Gen-Z protests that rocked the country about three months ago, Mr
Gachagua’s warning to the West, we understand, is that kicking him out would lead to another wave of protests and possibly usher in anarchy.
Mr Gachagua’s office coordinates the development partners’ forum chaired by the United Nations Resident Coordinator Steven Jackson, and he hopes to utilise such networks to have the West in particular, ask the president to deescalate the situation.
The fifth strategy which, like the rest is already in force, according to the thinking of his inner sanctum, is to guilt-trip the President.
Here, the script is to remind Dr Ruto of the promises he made or may have made to his number two or his central bastion with a view to pricking his conscience to call his foot soldiers back to the base.
“President Ruto gave a promise, a commitment to the people of Kenya that under his watch should they elect him as president, his deputy will never be demeaned, harassed, persecuted or harassed. I thank him that for the first year he didn’t allow anybody to harass me. But it’s happening now, from Cabinet ministers to all. The deputy president is abused by people hanging on his car and he’s quiet. Let him keep the promise he gave the people of Kenya,” the DP said recently in an interview with Citizen TV.
To Mr Gachagua’s handlers, resignation is not on the cards — but again it is if everything else fails.
He’s is not quitting, he has said many times, and even repeated on Saturday in his whirlwind tours of the Mountain but at the risk of being condemned to political oblivion via impeachment, he’d chose to pre-empt it and quit.
A member of his legal team said that his boss could consider resigning if convinced that Senate would uphold an impeachment vote by the National Assembly, but he’s quick to add that this is a tall order.
Lawyer Willis Otieno also reaffirms that an impeached public officer like the DP is ineligible to hold any public office hence an early resignation would save his skin if at all the opposing camp marshals enough numbers.
“You cannot hold any other public office if impeached. You become ineligible to run for any office or even appointment to public office. The Supreme court reaffirmed this in the Mike Sonko case,” Mr Otieno said.
He was referring to the case of former Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko who was impeached and later put a spirited fight in court, before the Supreme court slammed brakes on his political career.
Then there are those in Mr Gachagua’s camp who believe a majority of MPs, especially from Mt Kenya and Nakuru County, were likely to skip an impeachment vote over potential political backlash and hostility on the ground.
Embakasi Central MP Benjamin Gathiru, popularly known as Mejja Donk, says some of the legislators have already indicated they will not vote despite signing up. This will deny the Ruto camp the two-thirds (233 MPs) needed.
