Mashujaa Day, Gachagua and Mau Maus' organised irrelevance

The sense of national unease was evident in the low-key 2024 Mashujaa Day celebrations in which the public failed to turn up to listen to officials speak about government achievements.

In the main Kwale celebration centre, the government recognised a few real anti-colonial heroes like Mekatelili wa Menza who opposed the establishment of colonialism and repeatedly ended up in exile.

It was a low-key event that showed no interest in those who ended colonial rule, especially the Mau Maus whose organised national irrelevance is on the rise.

Some of the children and grandchildren of the Mau Mau, before the 2022 elections, had deluded themselves into believing that their time had come to be recognised only to sink deep into the status of national uselessness.

Symbolically, this message came through the political tribulations of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, rising from the high of chest-thumping as ‘Son of Mau Mau’ to sleeping in hospital during his Senate trial as a sick man.

Not in Kwale to play his role as deputy president, Gachagua made statements about repeated attempts to kill him and blamed it on President William Ruto.

Gachagua’s accusations were part of the unfolding drama called impeachment and played in the theatre of Parliament.

He and his Mau Maus, having outlived their usefulness of discrediting the Kenyatta family, had to leave the Kenyan scene in discredited ways. Since the outcome of the impeachment exercise in the National Assembly and the subsequent trial and conviction in the Senate were pre-determined, what remained unknown was the theatre of confusion.

In the National Assembly, it later emerged, members voted to impeach out of fear, bribery, and spite for Gachagua’s supposed ‘Murima’ crusade.

In the Senate trial, with the main prosecution witness having problems answering simple questions, the stress was on the politics which had little to do with fairness or evidence.

Again fear, bribery, and spite seemingly explain the pre-determined conviction which then set the stage for courtroom drama.

The expected drama shift to the courtrooms was next in the political script. First, it showed Ruto’s political astuteness in diverting public attention from crises to implement unpopular policies.

He dangled the DP card to ‘leaders’ who hoped to replace Gachagua and Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi and Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga featured as political spicing for the real focus was on confusing the Mountain.

Since Ruto had intimated he wanted a woman deputy, the names of Anne Waiguru, Susan Kihika and Alice Wahome kept cropping up. They too were flavour adding for the real attention was on supposedly influential men Kithure Kindiki of Tharaka Nithi and Murang’a’s Irungu Kangata wa Barua with Ruto’s choice being Kindiki.

Second, lawyers captured imagination poking holes in the entire impeachment saga as Constitution mutilating. They put the unfairness of the process into public record despite the decisions.

Lawyers from past political wars who were largely responsible for the build up to the 2010 Constitution, Paul Muite and John Khaminwa, returned to the judicial battlefield, in the company of younger ones.

Khaminwa went viral ‘teaching law’ to the government side and dismissing former Attorney General Githu Muigai as ‘breastfeeding’ when Khaminwa started practising law. In the midst of a national crisis, Khaminwa asked, what the judicial hurry was for? The public received no answer.