Rigathi Gachagua and Fred Matiang’i spent most of 2022 on opposite sides of one of the most fiercely contested elections in Kenya’s history. Gachagua was on the ballot as William Ruto running mate.
Fred Matiang’i is working to keep President William Ruto out of State House. Three years later, they are sharing rally stages and talking about sending Ruto home after one term. Anne Waiguru, Governor Kirinyaga county thinks the whole thing will fall apart before it does any real damage. Not everyone agrees with her.
Waiguru has been one of president Ruto’s steadiest defenders in the Mt. Kenya region, and she has not been shy about her doubts. In a December 2025 interview with the Daily Nation, she said Gachagua was dragging the region toward the opposition without giving voters anything real in return. Then in March 2026 she went a step further — claiming Gachagua had been quietly sending emissaries to cut a deal with Ruto, even as he stood on stages calling for the President to go. She said that told you everything you needed to know about how serious the “one-term” campaign really was.
“In Kenyan politics, today’s rivals can become tomorrow’s partners,” Waiguru said. She was not being philosophical. She was issuing a warning. Mt. Kenya voters, she argued, have heard the promises before. What they have not heard from Gachagua or Matiang’i is what, exactly, comes after Ruto.
The “wantam” slogan
Kenyans have a habit of compressing political slogans until they fit in a WhatsApp message. “One-term president” became “wantam,” and now you see it on T-shirts at opposition rallies from Kisumu to Nyeri. It is catchy. The question nobody has answered cleanly is whether the two men most associated with it — Gachagua and Matiang’i — are genuinely prepared to settle for one of them carrying the ticket in 2027, or whether each is privately expecting to be that person.
“Mt. Kenya voters need to hear what a future government will actually deliver — beyond the sharing of spoils.”
— Gov. Anne Waiguru, Daily Nation, Dec. 2025
Matiang’i’s political journey over the last few years has been unusual, even by Kenyan standards. Under President Uhuru Kenyatta, a 2019 executive order put him in charge of all cabinet sub-committees, giving him supervisory authority over every other minister. That earned him the nickname “The Super CS” and made him, for a while, arguably the second most consequential person in government. That version of Matiang’i is gone. He is now Jubilee Party deputy leader, a declared 2027 presidential candidate, and one of the politicians Ruto singles out most sharply in public. The President has accused him of human rights violations during his time at Interior. Matiang’i has said flatly that the accusations are false, and that he would welcome a judicial inquiry.
In May 2025, Matiang’i visited Gachagua’s home in Wamunyoro, Nyeri, and told the people there he was willing to drop his own presidential ambitions if the opposition could agree on a single candidate capable of beating Ruto. That kind of statement plays well at a rally. Whether it means anything when the candidate selection talks actually begin is a different question entirely.
An unlikely alliance
On 17 October 2024, Gachagua became the first deputy president in Kenya history to be removed from office under the 2010 Constitution. The Senate voted to uphold his impeachment. He challenged it in court. The courts have not given him his job back. Many people in Mt. Kenya believe the process was politically motivated. Whatever the truth of that, Gachagua walked out of the deputy president’s office with something politicians rarely get for free: genuine public sympathy. He used it to set up the Democracy for Citizens Party and present himself as the man the system had tried to silence.
Matiang’i comes at this from a completely different angle. He was in Raila Odinga Azimio coalition in 2022, working alongside Kenyatta to stop the same man Gachagua was helping to elect. His appeal is not about grievance. It is about a record — a perception, held by a section of the electorate, that he knows how to run things. The two men are not natural partners. They do not come from the same political circles, they do not share the same backers, and they are chasing a lot of the same votes in Central Kenya. What they do share is one specific goal: making sure Ruto does not get a second term.
They made that public on 4 May 2025 at the Wamunyoro gathering, standing alongside Martha Karua, Kalonzo Musyoka, and Justin Muturi. One candidate. One coalition. One objective. Whether that gathering holds up under the pressure of an actual election campaign is what the next 16 months will answer.
The numbers problem
According to December 2025 Infotrak polls found Fred Matiang’i at 17% in Central Kenya, with Gachagua at 13% in the same region. A four-point gap between two men competing for the same voters, in what is supposed to be their shared stronghold, is not trivial. Add in the fact that the wider coalition — Kalonzo, Karua, Muturi — has no agreed process for picking a joint candidate, and you start to understand the size of the task.
In February 2026, Waiguru brought up the old “Yangu kumi, ya Ruto kumi” political pact from the Kenyatta years, the arrangement by which Mt. Kenya’s political leadership pledged to back Ruto in exchange for a share of government. Her message to the region’s leaders was blunt: that kind of trust takes years to build and one bad decision to destroy. “Once you break trust, no one takes you seriously again,” she said. She was talking about Gachagua, and everyone in the room knew it.
Most Kenyans are not following the Gachagua–Matiang’i soap opera out of fascination. They are watching because they have been through enough elections to know that a divided opposition is a gift to whoever is sitting in State House. The criticism Waiguru levels at the opposition camp has a genuine point inside it, even if her motives are not entirely neutral. You cannot beat an incumbent with a slogan alone. At some point you need a plan, a candidate, and a coalition that does not fall apart the moment the money and the cameras show up.
What comes next
The hardest conversation the opposition has to have will not happen on a rally stage. It will happen in a room with no cameras, where Gachagua and Matiang’i — and Kalonzo, Karua, and Muturi — have to agree on which one of them actually stands. DCP is barely a year old and has not faced a general election. Matiang’i has never won elected office. Kalonzo has run for president three times and finished third each time, yet he carries the votes of an entire region the coalition cannot afford to lose.
The maths of a Kenyan presidential election does not care about slogans. You need more than 50% of all votes cast. You also need at least 25% of the vote in 24 of the 47 counties. No Mt. Kenya candidate has ever cleared that threshold without substantial support from outside the region. That means Gachagua and Matiang’i need each other, and they need Kalonzo, and they need to sort out the succession question before it sorts itself out in a way that benefits none of them.
Waiguru is watching and waiting. She has said the opposition needs a genuine alternative, not just a campaign against one man. That is a reasonable point. Right now the opposition has energy, it has crowds, and it has “wantam” on every third T-shirt in Central Kenya. What it does not yet have is a candidate. With 16 months to go, that is the only thing that actually matters.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Kurunzi News’s editorial policy.
