Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua addresses wananchi in Kagumo town, Kirinyaga, during a tour with President William Ruto on August 10, 2024.
Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua has had to play hardball to escape the impeachment noose that has been dangling around his neck for just over a month.
His loyalists now say the impeachment debate was a wider plot sneaked in as part of the deal for Raila Odinga loyalists to join government.
But thanks to a fightback plan that worked to outwit the plotters, President William Ruto in a Saturday morning meeting with some Mt Kenya leaders decided to order a total abandonment of the impeachment debate in exchange for support for the already sworn-in Cabinet secretaries from the opposition.
It was reported that the President was worried that Mr Gachagua was increasingly becoming a point of reference for the majority of Mt Kenya voters who seemed to be waiting for his direction regarding the inclusion of the opposition in government.
To overcome the uncertainty and win back Gachagua, who had earlier said he was interested in how President Ruto's Rift Valley allies would vote on his impeachment motion, he sought the cooperation pact.
"We knew well in advance that there were those who were demanding to be given the deputy presidential slot to accept to join President Ruto's government," said Embakasi North MP James Gakuya.
Mr Gakuya said the plot was to make Mr Gachagua look bad and unappealing to the national face thus justifying his impeachment.
He said this was why pressure after pressure was unleashed on Gachagua when the President dissolved his Cabinet and culminated when the broad-based Cabinet was named with six members from the opposition.
Team of experts
Mr Gachagua had on August 4, 2024, revealed that he had since assembled a team of experts to help him gain a deeper understanding of what was in the cooking.
"I'm not an ordinary guy...My earlier days of being a uniformed officer helped me understand many things about how the government works," Mr Gachagua said.
He added that he has since invested in networks in government and was well aware of the scheme that was being laid.
Mr Gachagua is reported to have started laying down his survival plan through critical analysis of options for him.
Most of the Mt Kenya vernacular media stations hosted debates on talk shows that played up his tribulations.
Some Mt Kenya musicians and comedians started releasing hits and reels in support of Gachagua.
Nyeri Governor Mutahi Kahiga says that he took up the role of the lead attack line against the impeachment schemes "as the father figure of the deputy president's home county".
He says he needed no prompting to take the whole scheme head on "and my task was to ensure we returned fire by fire to a point I declared kama mbaya, mbaya (if it is worse let it be so)".
Mr Kahiga says his defence was that no one could make Mr Gachagua look bad, abandoned and vulnerable.
Former Kiambu governor Ferdinand Waititu was one of those who played a crucial role in helping Mr Gachagua stage a fight-back plan.
"Those of us who know how these things work would never have let Mr Gachagua hang," he told Nation Africa.
In this task, Kiambu Senator Karungo Thang'wa, MPs Jayne Kihara (Naivasha), Mary wa Maua (Maragua), Kajiado Central's Onesmus Ngogoyo, Juja's George Koimburi, Embakasi Central's Benjamin Gathiru among others became the Gachagua's shield.
Mr Waititu added that Mr Gachagua's survival plan was based on three aspects - mustering the numbers in Parliament and the Senate to defeat the motion by denying it a two-thirds majority support, rallying Mt Kenya behind him and coming up with a pressure agenda in government.
"This is how Mr Gachagua began to make deliberate inroads into Mt Kenya, mobilising elected leaders to accompany him.
30 elected leaders
At an event on 19 May, 2024’s Gachagua visit to Kirinyaga County to bury his high school teacher Mr Kano Ndumbi, the more than 30 elected leaders accompanying him vowed to crush all those undermining him.
In the process, he received advice from the Council of Elders that he should apologise to the Kenyatta family and tone down his confrontational speeches while explaining that he was elected by the people and that sending him home would also affect the State House tenancy.
According to the chairman of the Kikuyu Council of Elders, Mr Wachira Kiago, the deputy president has approached regional weasels for advice on how to unite the mountain behind him.
"We endorsed the campaign and were elated when he publicly apologised to the Kenyatta family. We blessed him for uniting the mountain people for his own political security and for our collective good," he said.
Mr Gachagua needed allies to give him leverage and Mr Kiago says it was in this spirit that the elders started announcing meetings with Kalonzo Musyoka loyalists for a possible alliance.
What remained was to make Gachagua look like a threat to the entire Kenya Kwanza Alliance government should he be sent packing.
The Jubilee Party secretary-general, on the advice of former president Uhuru Kenyatta, said his boss was against Gachagua's impeachment.
"Mr Gachagua has started going to vernacular media stations to make suggestive speeches, sometimes declaring that he will give directions on where the community should move to in the near future," says Charles Mwangi, don of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture Technology.
He adds that Mr Gachagua's "I am a villager" moniker, as well as his "one- man-one-shilling one-vote" agenda, must not have come from a place of conviction, but from a place of survival.
"By dragging the National Intelligence Service into the fray, accusing it of being behind Mr Odinga's pact with President Ruto, as well as trying to frame him with political liabilities to pave the way for his impeachment, State House was bound to feel rattled," he adds.
By targeting the NIS, Gachagua knew he was antagonising the nerve centre of the country's security and it was bound to feel shy and recommend a solution that would spare it the dirty scrutiny.
Most interesting is the revelation by Nyeri Senator Mr Wahome Wamatinga that "another strategy we applied was to feign differences with Mr Gachagua to enable the schemers of the plot to speak to us freely".
He told Nation.Africa that "we as his friends knew the impeachment was a tough call to actualise...But we were taking no chances...some of those who came out opposing Mr Gachagua were just a tactical dispatch".
He added that the strategy helped since they would be invited to plotting meetings and would relay back the information to Mr Gachagua.
“That is how we managed to make the impeachment plot look like a mere fertile imagination that we painted as out to wreck the government," he said.
He said that "as the chair of the Mt Kenya senators we had agreed that we would not entertain any attempts to make it happen".
Mr Wamatinga said, "should it have happened you would have been surprised at the behind-the-scenes preparations where you would have been dumbfounded by the numbers we would have paraded".
He said that with time, as the fight-back strategy posted positive results, the impeachment debate retreated to social media banters.
"We are now happy that the debate has now been ordered dead by the President and Gachagua can now concentrate on offering his energies to the many service delivery battles confronting us as a nation".
