Makau Mutua and former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua.
It’s already the silly season in Kenya. Exhibit A is disgraced ex-Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua who is running around the country calling everyone who cares to listen a “cousin.” In a virtually biblical revelation, Mr Gachagua has suddenly discovered that some Kenyans are “cousins.”
Just last year, before his ignominious political demise, Mr Gachagua divided Kenyans into two hostile groups in a company called Kenya. In this corporate body, the man from Mathira saw only “shareholders” pitted against “non-shareholders.” In his telling, shareholders were entitled to everything and non-shareholders to nothing.
The scarlet letter distinguished those who voted for Kenya Kwanza and those who voted for Azimio. Those from Azimio were like the progeny of Lucifer and didn’t deserve a seat at the table.
What actually did Mr Gachagua mean in this “Us” versus “Them” narrative? In his warped view, the “us” referred to the Central Kenya-Rift Valley political duopoly that had overwhelmingly voted for Kenya Kwanza against the “rest” who had voted for Azimio. Never mind the little detail that both blocs had nearly identical numerical strength, only separated by several hundred thousand votes.
But to Mr Gachagua, this miniscule distinction was enough to create camps of “haves” and “have-nots” or “insiders” and “outsiders,” Kenyans and non-Kenyans. Mr Gachagua was playing off an old script honed in the era of the KANU one-party state whose leitmotif was the essentialisation of the tribe in Kenya’s politics. Its raison d'être was to keep Kenya’s ethnic groups divided to rule them.
Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua (in red suit) with other officials during the unveiling ceremony of Democracy for the Citizens Party (DCP) in Lavington, Nairobi on May 15, 2025.
As a provincial administrator and graduate of KANU’s school of hard knocks, Mr Gachagua cut his teeth as the enforcer of its brutal rule in the backwaters of Kenya. That’s how he sees Kenya – as a collection of disparate and hostile marauding ethnic groups engaged in a mortal combat for political power in a zero-sum game. He’s not aware that Kenyans adopted a progressive Constitution in 2010, a national character that seeks to forge a person, who is truly Kenyan and not from a particular ethnic group. The man has no other principle for organising politics other than the tribe. That’s why he’s addicted to terms like “people of the mountain,” or “andu maitu” (our people). Now it’s “cousins.”
Ethnic bloc
For those with short memories, the deployment of the lexicon of “cousins” may seem innocent. Let me assure you it’s not. It’s, in fact, the kind of language that has inspired genocides elsewhere. Just last year, Mr Gachagua didn’t know the term “cousin” existed and could easily be found by any educated person in the dictionary in any language.
Now he shouts the term “cousins” like a child who’s been let lose in a candy store. But it’s a coded political message in a deadly and bilious wrapping. “Cousins” in his vision is an ethnic bloc whose centre of gravity is Central Kenya in particular and generally the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru (known by the acronym Gema) supplemented by the Akamba. In his fertile imagination, Mr Gachagua imagines that in 2027, this ethnic cobbling will form the core of the winning coalition.
Mr Gachagua intends to invite other “cousins” from the Coastal Bantu, among others, into this grouping to supposedly counter the Nilotes of the Rift Valley and Nyanza. He strongly believes this large ethnic “cousinage” can be fashioned into a political juggernaut to send President William Ruto home in 2027.
A punishing revenge
Tellingly, this vision of politics has nothing to do with Kenya or Kenyans in his machinations. Its purpose is one, and only one – to inflict a punishing revenge on President Ruto. I don’t even think Mr Gachagua cares very much how he gets there so long as his nemesis is vanquished. If he divides Kenya in two, so be it.
Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua meets his supporters after unveiling his new political outfit, the Democracy for the Citizens Party (DCP), in Lavington, Nairobi on May 15, 2025.
What I wonder is whether the dramatis personae in Mr Gachagua’s play understand him well. Among the most prominent in this script are Wiper’s Kalonzo Musyoka and former minister Fred Matiang’i. Minor players are People’s Liberation Party’s Martha Karua and DAP-K’s Eugene Wamalwa. In my view, all four are expendable fodder in Mr Gachagua’s revenge mission. Just last year, they were worthless in his conception of humanity.
For now, they seem content to play his political vassals. That said, Mr Gachagua himself has yet to plant his boot firmly on the neck of GEMA. It’s fair to say that he has to politically neuter Jubilee’s Uhuru Kenyatta completely to crown himself the Central Kenya kingpin. The jury is still out on this question.
I want to close this column by telling Mr Gachagua that I am not his “political cousin.” I may belong to the ethnic “cousinage” he wants to transform into a nuclear weapon against President Ruto but we have nothing else in common except biology and linguistic proximity. People like Mr Gachagua tear countries apart, they don’t build them. Kenyans beware of this embittered fellow.
Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. He’s Senior Advisor on Constitutional Affairs to President William Ruto. On X: @makaumutua.
