Gachagua Rules Out Mediation With Uhuru Kenyatta, Declares 'We Are One Team'

NAIROBI, Kenya — Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua has dismissed calls for mediation between him and former President Uhuru Kenyatta, insisting that the two leaders require no broker because they already stand on the same side. His answer to the reconciliation push was emphatic: "we are one team," the former deputy president said, in remarks that appeared to foreclose any formal talks between the two camps.

The statement addresses one of the most closely watched relationships in Kenyan politics, and it lands as parties begin positioning for the general election scheduled for August 2027. Both men anchor their support in the Mt Kenya region, the country's largest voting bloc, which is why periodic reports of friction between them, and now of unity, command national attention in the capital.

Gachagua served as deputy president from September 13, 2022, when he was sworn in alongside President William Ruto, until October 2024, when parliament removed him from office. The National Assembly in Nairobi impeached him on October 8, 2024, on charges that included gross violation of the Constitution, and the Senate upheld five counts on October 17, 2024, completing his removal. He denied the allegations and has consistently characterized his ouster as politically driven.

Kenyatta, the son of Kenya's founding president Jomo Kenyatta, governed the country from 2013 to 2022 before handing power to Ruto, his estranged deputy. In the August 2022 election, Kenyatta broke with Ruto and campaigned instead for longtime opposition leader Raila Odinga, a rupture that followed the 2018 handshake between Kenyatta and Odinga and the resulting marginalization of Ruto within the outgoing administration.

Gachagua, then the member of parliament for Mathira constituency in Nyeri County, ran as Ruto's running mate in that contest and ranked among the fiercest critics of the Kenyatta administration, attacking its economic record and opposing the Building Bridges Initiative, the constitutional amendment project Kenyatta championed with Odinga before the courts struck it down. The estrangement between the two men was personal as well as political: in 2021, during Kenyatta's final term, the Asset Recovery Agency obtained court orders freezing more than 200 million shillings linked to Gachagua in a proceeds-of-crime suit, a case the agency later withdrew after Gachagua became deputy president.

Since his impeachment, Gachagua has repositioned himself as an opposition figure and a persistent critic of the Ruto administration he once served. Kenyatta has kept a lower profile since leaving office, though his residence in Gatundu, Kiambu County, has continued to draw visiting politicians courting Mt Kenya legitimacy, and the region delivered a decisive share of the votes that carried the Ruto-Gachagua ticket to victory in 2022.

The declaration that the two men are one team now resets the Mt Kenya conversation as coalition-building accelerates. Kenya's next general election falls due in August 2027, and alliances across the political divide are already under negotiation, with every significant declaration from the region's senior figures parsed for signals of alignment.

What bears watching next is whether the unity Gachagua proclaims matures into a formal electoral arrangement, and how Ruto's camp responds to any consolidation of the two men, each of whom broke with the president at a different point, Kenyatta in 2022 and Gachagua in 2024.