“Don’t worry about these people. Forget about these characters and be like me,” Vice President Ligati Gachagua said at a meeting in Murang’a a few months after he was elected president. At the funeral, he barked angrily, foaming at the mouth.
For several minutes, the vice president of the democratically elected government lashed out against the free media, calling it a corrupt cartel and an instrument of the overthrown “system.”
“You’re not getting us anywhere. If we defeat the Deep State and the System, who are you?” He pushes further in the broadside, waving his fingers menacingly. He made a brazen threat.
“We don’t need your opinion and we don’t care because we know who’s paying you.”
This was Gachagua, at the height of his short-lived power in Kwanzaa, Kenya, a man who hated the media to his core. At every opportunity and occasion, he mocked, flogged, and lathered members of the media.
His questionable background in student politics, shady past in state administration, brief stint in Congress, and controversial circumstances leading up to the 2022 presidential election led him to this mission.
As a uniformed officer, he was used to demanding orders in the baraza and imposing government policy on the population. The system he favored at the time ignored calls for accountability, transparency, and public participation.
To the system that removed him as its leader, Media was, in the words of the celebrity, an illegitimate child born on the street. Nothing good can come from such an organization.
Although he lent his tongue to the establishment, he did not remain active in the government for long. From being a candidate for the local civil service in 1990 to becoming personal assistant to the chief executive in 1991, returning as DO in 1997, and personal assistant to Local Government Minister Uhuru Kenyatta in the early 2000s, he has always worked for large corporations. I was in the shadows. man.
Other than an unconfirmed government memo that continues to circulate, the circumstances of his departure from public service remain unclear at best and dangerous at worst. Few seem to know what happened or where he disappeared to, until he pops out when his brother Nderitu Gachagua’s star goes dark.
Elected to Matira in 2017 in the shadow of his late brother, he had a lackluster term until a highly publicized corruption scandal propelled him to the center of succession politics. When William Ruto bet on him as his running mate, attention now shifted to the former DO who has spent his life avoiding the limelight.
It also didn’t help that the media was caught up in the conflict between Ruto and Kenyatta. Mr. Gachagua happily accepted the vice presidential nomination and trained his eyes, ears, and mouth on the media. The narrative at the time was that the media were part of the “deep state” they were against.
In victory, he bared all his fangs. Between his derailment in his inaugural speech and the revelation of his doomed “shareholding” theory, Mr. Gachagua faced media criticism that led to early fights.
In his world, government was like a corporation with stock and owners. Some owners had a majority stake, some had just a few shares, and some had none at all. It was a question of how to invest in companies.
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“That’s what happens to me, and you know it too,” he said in a dig while the editorial was written and read aloud, criticizing the “shareholder” remarks.
When the first whiffs of corruption flared within the government in early 2023, Gachagua distanced himself from government officials who harshly criticized the media for reporting on the issue. They named the media and banks to destroy them and declared them cartels.
Every time he was given a chance to correct himself by those same media outlets, he would either rub it in or go off the rails and say, “You know what? “We expect the media to know the election is over. Azimio lost! We know you slept with them. Can you stop living in denial? ?”
It was Gachagua that promoted the government’s restraint in voicing its concerns to the media “with the people of Kenya.” In essence, the government will now turn the people against the media.
As a result, there have been growing calls for the media to be held accountable. Mr Gachagua, who presided over the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, lashed out at the graduation ceremony and mocked the media for crying out loud when he was held accountable, saying he was happy that the media was under pressure. He emphasized that there is.
“You don’t see anything,” he said, adding: You have attacked us left, right, and center, and no one has held you accountable. ”
Throughout 2023, Gachagua ran a campaign to inform Kenyans of the media’s bias during the election period. He claimed the media was sponsoring headlines against Mr Ruto’s bid, conducting fake polls and joining the Azimio coalition.
He was particularly disdainful of the Standards Group’s establishment, often naming it at public meetings and events and ridiculing the group’s coverage of national issues, including his office’s budget requests.
“And I would like to call on the Standard. They owe an apology to the Office of the Vice President.”
Partly because of his acerbic tongue and habit of being rough with his critics, he baptized himself a “man of truth.” The honest man became his carefree, careless and reckless alter ego.
He said what others believed, but he couldn’t say it because it made him uncomfortable. He reinvented the structure of hatchet jobs by placing this function at the top level. Because he had assumed the top job, his juniors did not have to crush the media, opposition parties, or other organizations.
“No one can change me. I am natural. I will never change my language, my personality, the way I speak. Unless Kenyans tell me to stop. And they usually change my “I urge you to do so,” he once declared.
The more he spoke out, the more new enemies he had. Overzealous defenders of the Kenya Kwanzaa (KK) regime began to attract enemies within the government. The commotion grew louder, and a rebellion against him began to take shape.
As usual, he dismissed this as the work of his nemesis the media. They had refused to move on from Azimuo’s defeat.
“It’s going to be a long, long wait and we’re going to be disappointed. There will be no cracks in this government. This is a government of leaders united by a plan,” Mombasa said. He berated journalists and said they were waiting for KK to collapse.
He was submerged in a miasma of power when the Gen Z protests broke out in June, and with it his downfall began. This time, Gachagua did not blame the media. Instead, he directed his anger at Nuruddin Haji, the director of the National Intelligence Agency, and blamed the intelligence agency for its failures.
That became his Waterloo. Because a series of events put him in the line of fire. The opposition, which he spent so much time bashing, used the opportunity of the protests to negotiate entry into the government.
In a political coup, opposition leader Raila Odinga failed to lend a hand to protesters’ vociferous calls that “Ruto must go” and effectively crushed the movement. Officially, it has been argued that he did so out of fear that Ruto’s resignation would make way for a “man of integrity” to rule.
Some say this was simply a ploy to isolate Gachagua and put it where it belongs. In any case, the moment came when the Matira man was cut down. He began to become more and more attracted to the people and distanced himself from the government.
“I know my employer and I know who is important to me in this equation. The people who are important to me are the people I talk to, not the media. By the way, you quote me I don’t usually talk to you. I talk to people, I talk to Kenyans, and I have good chemistry with Kenyans,” he smiled.
He narrowed down all the Kenyan people to “Mountains” and rallied them for the upcoming battle. When all else failed, he turned to the media he had been bashing for two years to make his case.
“I want to thank you for reporting on the sloppy public participation in this impeachment motion,” he said on live television in one of his final interviews before impeachment.
From front-line torturers to media’s brand new psalmists, the apostates have come full circle.
“You are wonderful, good people,” said the “honest man.”
Ultimately, Jeffrey Ligati Gachagua’s story is a manifestation of the wisdom inherent in Proverbs 21:23: “He who guards his mouth and his tongue will guard his soul from tribulation.”
He failed with his tongue and mouth.
