On Gachagua's judgment, the High Court ended up impeaching itself

The Gachagua impeachment case.[File, Standard]

Ordinarily, in matters of high political voltage, such as the impeachment, trial, and conviction of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, the courts try to avoid creating confusion.

The case essentially tested the spirit of Kenya’s 2010 Constitution that created the post of an elected deputy president to stop President Daniel arap Moi’s habit of firing vice presidents on whims.

On Monday, June 8, 2026, a three-judge bench, instead of upholding the spirit of the 2010 Constitution, muddied constitutional waters and seemingly impeached itself during its roughly eight hours of trying to sound Solomonic.

Instead, the court appeared to mix up logic. University of Nairobi’s Muiru Ngugi argued that the court “took the baby and sliced [it] into two equal pieces and gave each mother a piece of the baby”. With the ‘constitution’ being the baby, Dr Muiru concluded: “We have a dead baby.”

Muiru, despite having a properly earned doctorate and teaching at a university, is not a lawyer and thus represents the views of many ordinary Kenyans. The imagery of the court presiding over the ‘funeral’ of Kenya’s constitution came from lawyer Ndegwa Njiru, whose knack for legal drama is unique. Njiru was among the lawyers who addressed the court.

Led by ‘elder’ Paul Muite, the lawyers wanted transcripts, all types of recordings, and summaries of the lengthy judgment to help them prepare appeals. Muite’s sharp ear heard one judge refer to an event as having happened in August 2026, which, he said, was a ‘typo’ that needed correcting.

Njiru accused the judges of presiding over a funeral of Kenya’s constitution. After the court found the Senate guilty of violating Gachagua's rights and awarded him Sh50 million in damages, lawyer Jane Njeri Maina asserted that money was never the issue. Institutional unfairness and trampling of the spirit of the Constitution were the ones.

The court, while deliberately failing to deal with the consequences of institutional unfairness in the Senate, made four general assertions of public interest. First, it validated its jurisdiction over the matter of Gachagua’s impeachment. Second, it declared that the National Assembly, the impeaching organ, had acted within the Constitution in deciding what the impeachment accusations were.

Third, the Senate was properly constituted as the trial court that decided to convict Gachagua of the impeachment charges.

Fourth, the court threw a spanner in its own thought process, which tended to nullify what the Senate had done. It found the Senate guilty of violating Gachagua’s rights to a fair hearing and still upheld the Senate's ‘unfair’ decision to oust Gachagua.

To ordinary non-lawyer Kenyans, the court contradicted itself, and its logic did not sound logical. It gave the impression of having a preset mind, just like the National Assembly and the Senate appear to be when voting on issues that the executive has an interest in.

In the National Assembly, a member reportedly was asleep when he heard his name and voted ‘yes’ without knowing what he was voting for. Others confessed to having been threatened or bribed to vote in certain ways.

‘Wizards and ‘witches’

If so, such MPs were not their own free agents. The court curiously found that the Senate was unfair to Gachagua and decided that the Senate was still right in convicting a person whose rights it had violated.

The court's reasoning was even more baffling than its mixed decision. It claimed that it did not want to create a situation where there would be two deputy presidents. It changed from being a place of pursuit of ‘justice’ into one of expediency, which only legal ‘wizards and ‘witches’ can understand.

To claim that a wrong can remain in place because of time and events stretches common sense. To make time and events a reason for not righting wrongs done begs ‘reason’. The wrong in this case was that the court acknowledged unfairness in the impeachment, which in turn impeaches the court; the court is impeached.