It started, as most Kenyan political fires do, with a microphone and a vernacular radio station. Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua had been making the rounds on Mt Kenya airwaves, pushing a single, potent message — that President William Ruto hates the Mt Kenya people, that he has systematically purged their sons and daughters from government. It was a narrative designed to sting, and it did.
Cabinet Secretary Julius Ruku had heard enough. In a series of interviews with local radio and television stations, Ruku came out swinging — not with the cautious, hedged language of a bureaucrat protecting his job, but with the bluntness of someone who felt the attack was personal. Because for him, it was.
“A personal problem should not be turned into a community problem,” Ruku said flatly. He did not mince words. Gachagua’s falling out with Ruto was exactly that — a falling out between two men who once shared power and now share nothing but mutual contempt. Dressing that up as a Mt Kenya grievance, Ruku argued, was manipulation, plain and simple.
Gachagua was impeached in October 2024 in a process that moved with startling speed through both chambers of Parliament. He has since positioned himself as a martyr of the Mt Kenya community, a man punished not for any personal failing but for standing up for his people. It is a compelling story. Ruku says it is fiction.
Ruku pointed to the Cabinet Secretaries, Principal Secretaries, and other senior government officials from the Mt Kenya region still holding their positions as proof that no purge had taken place. “You cannot tell me that the President hates people from Mt Kenya when he has appointed all these senior officials to his Government,” he said. The argument is transactional and deliberate — power is measured in appointments, and the appointments are still there.
Weeks into the public back-and-forth, Gachagua escalated on another front entirely — history. He began invoking the Mau Mau liberation struggle, framing Mt Kenya West as the heartland of the freedom fighter legacy, the true home of the resistance. To many young Kenyans, this might sound like an obscure historical dispute. It is not. In Kenyan politics, controlling the Mau Mau narrative is controlling moral authority, and moral authority is currency.
Ruku pushed back hard. He named names — generals like Baimungi Marete — to argue that Mt Kenya East was equally steeped in the liberation struggle. “It is not true that only Mt Kenya West had people who fought for independence,” he said. Then he made it personal: “I come from that lineage.” He accused Gachagua of weaponising history for political survival, of presenting himself as the sole custodian of a shared sacrifice he does not own.
By then, the conversation had shifted to the man who replaced Gachagua — Deputy President Kithure Kindiki. Ruku was emphatic: there is no vacancy, no succession drama worth entertaining. “Prof Kithure Kindiki is comfortably occupying that seat and doing his work,” he said, dismissing reports that former Kakamega Governor Wycliffe Oparanya was being floated as a potential replacement. Those angling for 2027 from the DP’s seat, Ruku said, should stop.
On the 2027 general election, Ruku projected confidence without apology. He cited the by-elections in Mbeere North and Ol Kalou as evidence that the Kenya Kwanza administration would not interfere with the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. “The 2027 election will be free, fair and verifiable,” he said. Whether you believe that or not depends entirely on how much faith you have left in official assurances — and in Kenya, that faith is always in short supply.
What Ruku’s offensive reveals is something more significant than one CS defending his boss. It shows that the battle for Mt Kenya is not over, that Gachagua’s narrative has enough traction to force a formal, public response from inside the government. Nobody deploys a Cabinet Secretary to radio stations because they are winning comfortably. They do it because the ground is shifting, and they know it.
