How Gachagua has now become Ruto's 'co-president'

DCP leader Rigathi Gachagua during a past conference in Nairobi. [David Gichuru, Standard]

Back on January 3, 2018, Kenya’s opposition icon Raila Odinga organised a swearing-in ceremony at Uhuru Park, where he took an oath as ‘the people’s president’ to protest the victory of his political nemesis, Uhuru Kenyatta.

Then, Kenya found itself in an unprecedented scenario with two presidents: Uhuru, the elected president, and Raila, the self-proclaimed people’s president. While Uhuru spoke to the country from Nairobi’s State House, Raila spoke to the country from his private offices at Capitol Hill.

This continued for three months, until Uhuru finally caved in and reached out to his political nemesis, and the two arrived at some rudimentary form of joint presidency that came to be called the handshake.

Whatever shape or form it took, the fact remained that, in between Raila’s swearing-in and the handshake, Raila was the people’s president—whenever he spoke, wherever he spoke, the country stopped to listen.

Barely a year after Raila’s death, it would appear that Kenya is finding itself in a similar situation, where we have the President of the Republic of Kenya, William Ruto, and Rigathi Gachagua, a man who is increasingly shaping up to be what Raila had become to Uhuru back then- a co-president.

By being able to accurately predict, or even explain, serious and highly sensitive matters in Kenya’s public sphere, Gachagua is proving to be pretty much in charge of this country’s affairs as much as his former boss is.

There is no doubt that Ruto’s men are running in circles trying to plug the leaks within their system, which have resulted in his former deputy being fed classified information, including the latest shock in which he implicated the police in the killing of a psychiatrist in Nairobi.

This latest revelation, which turned out to be true, ought to have triggered a complete overhaul of Ruto’s security and national intelligence apparatus. It did not. Instead, Ruto seems to be letting Gachagua get away with claim after claim.

In the end, Gachagua is increasingly winning the credibility test against his former boss, who appears to be struggling to fight off the image of a man whose word cannot be trusted. If the presidency in Kenya were to be determined by whose word, between Gachagua and Ruto, Kenyans can trust, Gachagua is ‘the people’s president.’

He is already speaking and acting like one. His recent series of ‘State of the Nation’ addresses, covered live in sections of the media, only reinforces the perception of two centres of power in Kenya.

But there is another dangerous angle to this. The fact that Gachagua seems to be always a step ahead of the government’s security apparatus, by itself, is seditious. If indeed, as Gachagua himself claims, he has a part of Kenya’s security apparatus answering to him, then it would seem that Ruto’s deputy has succeeded in pulling a quiet coup against his former boss.

A coup- for what else do you call a situation where a section of the country’s security apparatus quietly pledges its loyalty to someone else besides the sitting president and the commander-in-chief?

So what is Ruto to do in this situation?

The most obvious option would be a merciless and total overhaul of the country’s security apparatus, which might prove suicidal because firing perceived Gachagua moles from government right now would only make them bolder in spilling the beans from the other side.

The other option for Ruto would be to accept that he has a co-president in his former deputy, and work towards a handshake with his political nemesis, as Uhuru did with Raila back in 2018. This might appear impossible, but nothing is impossible in Kenyan politics.

The last option for Ruto would be to do nothing about Gachagua. He can continue burying his head in the sand and assume that the political storm Gachagua is blowing across the Mount Kenya region is nothing but a passing cloud.

But doing this would be putting himself well on his way to making another serious political blunder, like the one he made when he planned the impeachment of his deputy without a Plan B.

- Mr Muchiri is a media and public communications consultant.