DP Gachagua’s impeachment: Beginning of the end of the era of tribalism politics?
Gachagua was accused of 11 crimes, including illicit accumulation of wealth, violating the constitution, engaging in ethnic politics and undermining the president.
Journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans
The impeachment trial of Kenya’s Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua in the National Assembly, particularly the Senate, was a legal and political drama worth $1,000 if it had been a ticketed event.
Gachagua was accused of 11 “crimes”, including irregular accumulation of wealth, gross violation of the constitution, dabbling in dangerous ethnic politics, and undermining the president.
The National Assembly, a rough and tumble chamber with a proletarian sprinkling, tackled him hard and put him to the sword mercilessly.
The matter went to the upper chamber, the Senate, which is more sedate and magisterial, and it offered everything. Dazzlingly brilliant lawyers, deft politics, and gaffes. It was the kind of political drama you forced your 14-year-old to watch as a public affairs class.
Beyond the Kenyan political shenanigans behind it, it was an African political democratic project of significance. Perhaps of all countries in the continent, a Kenyan president is the one today most constrained by the constitution and law from sticking a knife in the back of his deputy and throwing him on a barbeque grill.
But even without that, it would still not be easy to depose a deputy president at will, because of the many peculiarities of Kenyan politics.
Since the rebound of multiparty democracy in December 2002, to win — or even steal —an election requires making a coalition with several political groups and interests.
After the post-election violence following the contentious December 2007 vote, coalition-making got more complex, and to overcome the betrayals that followed the 2002 election that was won by the 14-party National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), which became the first constitutional opposition to defeat and succeed a ruling party in East Africa, coalition agreements became more elaborate. Now such pacts have to be registered with the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties.
Thus, while a visitor arriving in Kenya from a faraway land might not see it immediately, with close attention she would find out that President William Ruto’s ruling Kenya Kwanza which came to office after the August 2022 elections, is even bigger than NARC, with 16 parties of varying sizes and shapes in it.
Their rival, Azimio la Umoja, was even bigger, having 25 parties inside its tent, but have since seen many of them decamp to the buttered Kenya Kwanza.
Therefore, a deputy president would still not have been easy to kick out, because, with the thin election-winning margins, it would easily upset the base needed to keep power and, especially, win the next election.
These restraints, in great irony, are a product of one of the worst aspects of Kenyan elections and governance – the dominance of ethnic politics.
Because no single ethnic group can generate an electoral majority alone, it is forced to bargain and negotiate with others. So-called “tribalism” in that sense serves an accidental democratic purpose.
The combined effect of all these factors is that of the many strands of democracy, Kenya’s is the closest one in the region to a classical liberal democracy.
However, the end of the “tribalism era” in Kenya now seems to have arrived, though it could take up to the 2037 election to come of age. Gachagua’s impeachment, in that sense, is the canary in the coal mine.
The 2022 election, which President Ruto won with Gachagua as his running mate, while it was still decided along regional votes, still had the strongest “anti-tribal” and cosmopolitan streaks in Kenya’s recent history.
This was then illustrated dramatically with the June and July Generation Z anti-tax and anti-corruption “tribeless, leaderless, and partyless” protests which roiled the country and shook the political establishment.
Some of these “tribeless” and cosmopolitan forces have been bred in Gachagua’s Central Kenya (also popularly known as Mount Kenya region) backyard among his Kikuyu kith and kin.
Its most populous county is Kiambu. Kiambu is also Kenya’s second and richest county after next door Nairobi. If one wants to peer into Kenya’s future, Kiambu is the place to look.
It is presently undergoing the most hectic gentrification anywhere on the continent, crisscrossed by an array of new highways and bypasses that have been built in the past 15 years.
Once a bastion of Kenya coffee growing, the plantations are disappearing to give way to expansive middle-class housing, satellite cities, and shopping complexes and pouring immense fortunes into the pockets of landowners there.
The cool young creative people and entrepreneurs are all heading to the apartments in Kiambu county, and one of its suburbs, a while back bested Nairobi for the most expensive housing in the country.
The new flood of residents of Kiambu is diluting its “ethic content”, as one journalist put it. Its working class from the coffee farms and tea estates, are becoming extinct. And like rich people everywhere, the growing affluent Mount Kenya class of the past 25 years, are producing fewer children.
People living in apartments soon get to worry about their uncollected garbage, than the harvest rituals of their ethnic community upcountry.
The demographic, and vote, pendulum has now begun to swing away from the Mountain mostly to western Kenya, and that is where those looking to win elections in future would do well to invest their capital.
In this “tribeless and partyless” moment, Ruto’s strategists will have read, correctly, that the cost of throwing Gachagua overboard into the sea would be less politically costly than it would have been 10 years ago.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. X(Twitter)@cobbo3
