President William Ruto (then Deputy President), shakes hands with his then running mate, Mr Rigathi Gachagua, at the DP’s Karen residence in Nairobi on May 15, 2022. PHOTO | LUCY WANJIRU | NMG
A deeper crack has emerged in the armour of the Kenyan ruling party, almost a week after violent bread protests convulsed East Africa’s largest economy. Hobbled by the demonstrations and the growing groundswell of resentment led by youngsters pressing on with the protests calling for his ousting later this week, Ruto, has barely received any succour from his deputy president, Rigathi Gachagua.
On Tuesday last week, protesters largely led by youngsters raided the central business district, demanding that the President should not assent to the Finance Bill, 2024, which had earlier been passed by Parliament. Security personnel shot dead about 23 protesters in the melee after protestors breached a security deployment and torched Parliament.
His raspy voice cracking, Ruto appeared alongside his allies during a televised address to the nation a day after the deadly protests to announce that he had declined to sign the Bill after listening to the people’s voice.
Moments after Ruto’s address, Gachagua, appeared at a separate news conference in the coastal city of Mombasa where he squarely laid the blame at the feet of the intelligence chief, Noordin Haji.
“Haji must take responsibility for the deaths that occurred and for the mayhem and for failing Ruto, the government and he must take responsibility for failing the people, for not doing his job and advising correctly. He must do the honourable thing, by not only taking responsibility but resigning from that office and allowing the president to pick a competent director general.”
Gachagua further claimed that the National Intelligence Service director was caught flat-footed by the protestors after he got rid of competent staff. “When he was appointed to the office as DG, because of the inferiority complex, he chased away all the people who were senior to him when he was in the service, thereby crippling the capacity of that service and making it dysfunctional,” said Gachagua.
By overtly criticising Haji, Gachagua attempted to isolate one of the major constituencies of Ruto’s fragile coalition in north-eastern Kenya, where the powerful Defence Cabinet Secretary, Aden Duale, hails from.
This area borders the restive Somalia and is the flashpoint for counter-insurgency operations against the Al-Shabab insurgents.
Amidst the cost of living crisis, which has resulted in a groundswell of resentment, the garrulous deputy president has recently attempted to craft an image of the ‘villager’ that appeals to the psyche of those in the lower rungs against his boss Ruto who has been christened the biblical Zakayo—a ruthless and corrupt tax-collector for the Roman empire who later received salvation from Jesus Christ. Gachagua who views himself as the supremo in Central Kenya has sharply contrasted Ruto’s allies from his backyard accusing them of being part of the nouveau-rich political cabal.
Timothy Kalyegira, who is a journalist and researcher, told Daily Monitor that, “Historically in Kenya, the vice president has sometimes been a rival for power or a near-equal to the president, and with this comes serious tensions. The first of these was Jomo Kenyatta-Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, then Mwai Kibaki under Moi, then the open bitterness between Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, and now Ruto and Geoffrey Rigathi Gachagua. In Kenya’s politics of ethnic alliances, the deputy president knows he brought a bloc vote to the ticket.”
He argued, “In other words, where in Uganda a vice president feels honoured to be handpicked by the president, the deputy president in Kenya knows he was crucial to the win because of the bloc vote he brought and so feels he is not an appointee; he is not an employee.” Drawing parallels, Kalyegira said President Milton Obote often clashed with his powerful Vice President and Defence Minister Paulo Muwanga during his second government between 1980-1985 because the latter felt that without his help, Obote wouldn’t have returned to power.
Gachagua was recently pictured carrying his luggage on the staircase of the Kenya Airways commercial flight to Mombasa. One of his implacable adversaries from the Central region and Ruto’s key ally, the majority leader in the National Assembly, Kimani Ichung’wah, accused him of posturing to court public sympathy.
“Neither President William Ruto nor the government of Kenya or Members of Parliament will succumb to blackmail. No amount of sympathy-seeking photos, vernacular station campaigns, or social media blogging troops will hand over billions to satisfy anyone’s insatiable greed for power and money,” read Ichung’wah’s statement on the micro-blogging site X. The trio of Kikuyu allies of Ruto including the majority leader in Parliament, Kimani alongside the Cabinet Secretary for Public Service, Moses Kuria alongside the chairperson of the Budget and Appropriations Committee in the National Assembly, Ndidi Nyoro, have also rejected Gachagua’s ‘one man, one vote, one shilling’ economic proposal, which they view as part of parochial politics of ethnic identity meant to selectively reward the populous Mt Kenya ethnic groups—the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru.
On Friday last week, Gachagua said he cannot turn into a ‘praise and worship’ sycophant at his age of 59 and will continue to speak candidly about the issues affecting the common man including his one man, one vote, one shilling campaign.
A former personal aide of Kenyatta, Gachagua broke ranks with Uhuru in 2022 when he was appointed as the running mate for Ruto under the United Democratic Alliance coalition. In 2023, he accused the Kenyatta family of stealing the inheritance of Mau Mau fighters. “They [Kenyatta] should return at least half of the parcels they took from Mau Mau. The vast parcels of land have over the years remained idle yet the Mau Mau and their children are being buried in public cemeteries.”
But he recently made a grovelling apology to the Kenyatta family and specifically apologised to Uhuru Kenyatta’s mother, former First Lady, Ngina Kenyatta, and Uhuru Kenyatta. For now, Ruto appears to be on his own without his deputy president who continues to portray his government as out of touch with the common man. The latest crisis portrays how the East and Horn of Africa region is fragile and the figure of speech that a day in politics is a lifetime. The jet-setting Ruto had a month ago made a triumphant return from the United States where he was feted by his host, President Joe Biden, with a state dinner and signed a pact for his country as the leading non-Nato ally in Africa. It also coincided with Ruto’s recent decision to send a UN police stabilising force of 400 to volatile Haiti, positioning him as the new point man of the West in the troubled region.
During his trip to the US, Ruto and his delegation flew on a luxury private jet worth $1.5m. His trip elicited flak but he used the microblogging site, X to say, “Fellow Kenyans, I have noted concerns on my mode of transport to USA. As a responsible steward of public resources and in keeping with my determination for us to live within our means and that I should lead from the front in so doing, the cost was less than travelling on KQ,” Ruto said on X social network on Sunday.
In a recent interview with the Voice of America, Ruto said the reported $1.5 million private jet cost was “exaggerated” and “ridiculous.”
According to a tally tabulated by Kenya’s Daily Nation, a sister newspaper to Daily Monitor, Ruto has made 62 trips to 38 countries in his first 20 months in power.
After rejecting the Finance Bill, Ruto must now make stringent austerity cuts to plug the funding gap after the national debt soared to nearly $80b, which is about three-quarters of the country’s GDP.
The 2024/25 Finance Bill sought to raise $2.7 billion in additional taxes to reduce the budget deficit and borrowing. For the president elected on the ticket to economically empower those in the lower rungs, now is the time to put his ‘hustler’ slogan into practice.
But Ruto may have to navigate the troubled waters without his deputy president who, according to the Kenya constitution, can only be removed from office through a two-thirds majority impeachment vote at the National Assembly and Senate or on the grounds of physical or mental incapacity.
