In the wake of Kenya’s Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua going missing from public space for seven days in the third week of May, concerns were raised about souring of relationship between President William Ruto and his deputy.

Significanlty, this was slightly over a year after there were also allegations in April last year of attmepted use of a senior member of staff at State House to poison an influential cabinet secretary as turf wars appeared to threaten harmony in the patchy Kenya Kwanza Alliance.

The alleged poisoning incident happened on April 18, 2023, during a cabinet meeting at State House. A number of ministers who attended the cabinet have denied the allegations, but ackowledged the bad blood that runs through the presidency “sometimes”.

Around the same time DP Gachagua had launched a series of searing attacks on Prime Cabinet Secretary and Cabinet Secretary for Foreign and Diaspora Affairs Musalia Mudavadi, who is said to have the president’s ear courtesy of his vast experience in running a government. Both have in the past publicly denied any rifts between them.

As President William Ruto toured Washington DC with senior officials in the United States, including President Joe Biden, a coterie of officials in the president’s United Democratic Alliance – the main party in the governing Kenya Kwanza Alliance – were busy tearing into each and opening further the fault-lines in the Kenya government.

Tell has been tracking the unsavoury exchanges on social media and runs them below to highlight the widening frictions in the Ruto administration:

Do you remember media houses moving from polling station to polling station in Kikuyuland, where the main story was that voters were not turning up to vote? In fact, at some point, towards 4pm, a county election official in Kiambu openly lamented that the day was ending and the region was headed for the lowest voter turnout in history. It was a disaster.

The explanation all round was that the Kikuyu Nation hated former Prime Minister and ODM or Azimio Alliance presidential candidate Raila Odinga so much so that they were sitting out the elections, especially after incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta had gone on all vernacular media a few days earlier and given an ominous warning about electing Ruto.

It was a scary no-show. For them, they would avoid United Democratic Alliance (UDA) and Kenya Kwanza Alliance presidential candidate William Ruto alright, but they wouldn’t vote Raila Odinga.

Do you then remember watching election results later in the night and wondering where all the votes suggesting a large turnout in Kikuyuland had come from? The media in this country is very lazy, so no one juxtaposed the huge Ruto numbers in central Kenya and the practically empty polling stations they had shown us all day.

We wouldn’t have known if lawyer Julie Soweto @JulieSoweto during the petition, hadn’t shown us the handiwork of Jose Carmago (a mysterious Argentine technology guru accused of interfering with electronic transmission of results). Where Kikuyu voters had chosen to stay away, the election thieves simply voted for them. In other words, the concept of Mt Kenya shares in the Kenya Kwanza government was a lie from the start. Ruto voted for himself in Kikuyuland.

And it doesn’t end there. The choice of Rigathi Gachagua as running mate had been contentious earlier. The Mt Kenya UDA establishment had wanted Kithure Kindiki. They had told Ruto that Rigathi was a vile dictator and a mannerless man. When he was picked, Kindiki immediately declared he was taking a political hiatus while Mt Kenya UDA politicians warned that it would end in premium tears.

Rigathi was coming in merely as Ruto’s appointee, without any support on the ground. Nobody wanted the cantankerous ruffian. Again, Ruto chose for himself a character whose only loyalty was to him.

These two factors are the reason Ruto is cutting Mt Kenya bloc to size so early, with no regard to consequences. In fact, haven’t hustlers in Kikuyuland confirmed this many times when they appear on television and scream “Sisi pia tunachidwo nani aripigia hii thirikari (heavily corrupted Kswahili for: We also don’t understand who voted for this government)”. Because they didn’t. They are not being betrayed. This was not their government, they claim.

Ruto simply created the illusion in order to help Carmago complete his work, by making it look like Kikuyus had voted for him. Their warnings about their son will go nowhere. They will not even hold a small demo. Plus, even if they do, Kikuyuland still lives in fear of the Kalenjin capacity for violence as shown in the 2008 postelection bloodbath.

Ruto can even lock up Gachagua in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison and you won’t hear even a gentle smelly fart from Kikuyuland in protest.

In response, Rigathi now supports the one-man-one-shilling – an untried and untested formula for national resource distribution. At face value, you would imagine he is discussing revenue sharing. But in real sense, he wants to use that line to push for more constituencies in Kikuyuland, believing that he can use it to win majority MPs in 2027 so that when he is ultimately replaced, he can use the numbers to negotiate to retain the DP slot.

But he doesn’t understand that his removal will be easy because, as Prof Macharia Munene avers, “Gachagua is a leader of nobody!” Ruto knows the soft underbelly of the Kikuyu Nation and has exposed it to the world. They will never return to cause political havoc out there.

The only path now available for Gachagua is a vacancy in the office of the president. Does he have the balls to help create that vacancy?

• By Kipkalya Kones

Reply …

This is a very lazy analysis (of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua tribulations in central Kenya). The last election was the very first election that Chief Justice (retired) David Maraga’s orders were imposed on the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). The real critical change was imposing the polling station as the primary unit of voting (and tallying) and its numbers as final. Additionally, capping the maximum size to 700 voters. This created 41,600 polling stations. With only a maximum of 700 people voting in a station over a 12 hours window, you end up with 58 voters per hour or roughly 1 voter per minute for a polling station with maximum number. Where will crowds come from? There were no crowds anywhere else. It’s just that we are obsessed with Kikuyu nation and its influence to election outcomes and that’s why media was focused there.

Tell Media fact-check:

In a media briefing dated June 20, 2022, IEBC provided the following data:

“The Commission is pleased to announce that the audit of the ROV has been completed by KPMG and the final report submitted to the Commission on 18th June 2022. The Commission, based on preliminary audit findings shared by KPMG (audit firm), implemented some of the recommendations and it is in the course of finalising the few remaining ones. As the Commission briefs the country today it is equally pleased to announce that the total number of registered voters is 22,120,458 and the number of polling stations *46,232.

Further, of the total number of polling stations, less than 500 stations registered below 700 voters. In the polling stations with high registration, the commission divided voters into streams to fast-track voting and tallying. Every stream had a maximum of 700 registered voters. The number of streams varied according to voter registration and according to region.

• A Tell report