Rigathi Gachagua’s short-lived career as Deputy President is not the story of betrayal he now tries to sell. It is the story of a man who built his rise on lies, repeated them until they defined him, and fell because the country eventually stopped believing a word he said.
His downfall was not tragic. It was inevitable.
His favourite excuse, repeated in Nyeri and Mathira rallies in March 2024, was that he had been “ordered” to attack Uhuru Kenyatta during the 2022 campaigns.In this version, he was a loyal soldier, following instructions from above. The truth was visible to anyone who watched him in Kiambu or Meru in July 2022: Gachagua wasn’t following orders, he was relishing the fight, spitting venom about Kenyatta being a selfish dynast. The idea that he was reluctantly doing someone else’s dirty work was laughable.
He built his career by turning Uhuru into a punchbag, then tried to wash his hands when it suited him.
In September 2023, he told mourners in Kirinyaga that he had been reduced to a “ceremonial deputy.” Yet on December 12, 2022, at State House, he boasted to the cameras that “nothing happens in this government without my input.” To claim both was not just inconsistent; it was pathetic. A man who one day thumps his chest as indispensable and the next day whines about irrelevance is not a leader. He is a fraud.
His Kericho speech in January 2023 was perhaps his purest moment. “This government is like a company with shareholders,” he said, “and those who voted for us will get dividends.” It was not a gaffe. It was his worldview, stated plainly. Then, when the backlash came, he claimed on Citizen TV the following month that he had been misunderstood, suddenly discovering the rhetoric of equality. The dishonesty was not subtle: he said what he believed in Kericho, then lied about it when it stung him.
Even where he claimed to fight for social reform, the deceit was obvious. In March 2023, he launched a war on alcoholism in central Kenya, summoning administrators to shutter bars near schools. By October, the campaign had quietly collapsed under pressure from bar owners. Yet in Karatina he declared the fight was “bearing fruit.” That was Rigathi politics in miniature: a failed programme dressed up as victory, the people’s misery hidden under a self-congratulatory lie.
On the economy, his reinventions bordered on parody. In June 2023, defending the Finance Act, he told the nation that “everyone must tighten their belt.” A year later, now estranged from Ruto, he stood in Nyeri and condemned the same Act as “a betrayal of hustlers.” He was both enforcer and critic of the same policy. What kind of leader is so cheap with his words that even his own speeches cancel each other out within a year?
Subsidies followed the same pattern. In September 2022, he dismissed them as “unsustainable luxuries.” When public anger forced Ruto to reinstate fuel subsidies in August 2023, Gachagua popped up to claim he had always supported them. The audacity was breathtaking: he denied his own statements in the hope that Kenyans had no memory.
His ugliest lie was the rewriting of his war against Uhuru. In Nakuru in July 2022, he labelled Kenyatta a failed leader who had betrayed his people. Yet in Nyeri in March 2024, he calmly told a crowd: “I never fought Uhuru, I only criticised policies.” This was not reinvention. It was contempt — contempt for the public, contempt for the record, contempt for the idea that truth matters.
By May 2024, on Inooro TV, he was recasting himself as a martyr: “I refused to lie to the president, and that is why I was punished.” The irony was unbearable. Rigathi Gachagua punished for honesty? His entire career was a testament to dishonesty. Colleagues did not cast him aside for telling the truth. They cast him aside because his lies had become too loud, too constant, too damaging.
Even at home in Mt Kenya, his claims rang hollow. From 2023 he boasted that he had delivered unprecedented funds, roads and allocations for the region. Governors openly contradicted him, pointing to empty pledges and delayed disbursements. Treasury records proved them right. He had delivered speeches, not resources.
And yet, he still clung to the final fiction: that he was a hustler-outsider, persecuted by the establishment. The record is unarguable. He was a provincial administrator under Moi, a personal aide to Uhuru Kenyatta in 2001, a Kibaki-era insider with lucrative business links, then MP for Mathira before vaulting into the deputy presidency. Rigathi Gachagua was never an outsider. He was the system’s loyal servant, feeding off it when it suited him and spitting on it when it didn’t.
Taken together, the lies, half-truths and contradictions reveal not a flawed leader but a hollow one. He lied in power to defend the indefensible. He lied out of power to excuse his failures. He lied about his enemies, then lied about lying about them. He was not a deputy president betrayed by his colleagues. He was a deputy president who betrayed himself with his own words.
And so Rigathi Gachagua will not be remembered for policies or reforms or a legacy of service. He will be remembered for something smaller, meaner, and truer: as the deputy who lied too often.
