Gachagua has disregarded useful lessons we have learnt over the years

I was shocked by the statement by former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua during the last day of official business of French President Emmanuel Macron and United Nations Secretary General António Guterres on Tuesday.

I have served this Republic as a District Officer, District Commissioner, and as the First Secretary of Provincial Administration in the Office of the President during Mwai Kibaki’s time. I later served as Permanent Secretary, First Governor of Bungoma County, Speaker of the Senate, and now again as the duly elected governor of Bungoma.

In all those years, across the administrations of presidents Daniel Arap Moi, Mwai Kibaki, and Uhuru Kenyatta, I have learned one immutable fact: There is no school more humbling, and no teacher more ruthless, than the loss of power. It is from that place of hard-won wisdom, and from a place of deep personal familiarity,  that I respond to my former classmate Rigathi Gachagua's continuing war with his former boss, President William Ruto.

I say personal familiarity advisedly because unlike most of those who have commented on Gachagua's remarks on Tuesday, I am not speaking about a stranger. Gachagua and I were year mates at the University of Nairobi. We walked the same corridors between 1985 and 1988. We sat in the same lecture halls. We debated ideas about governance, public administration, and the future of this country with the idealism that only young men who believe they can change the world carry within them.

We did not stop there. We served together as District Officers in the field, in the dust and difficulty of grassroots administration, where governance is not theory but the lived reality of ordinary Kenyans who need water, security, justice, and dignity. We learned the same things. We were shaped by the same institutions. And then we went to the Kenya Institute of Administration (KIA) where Kenya invested in us further, sharpening our understanding of public service, ethics, statecraft, and the solemn responsibility that comes with wearing the authority of this Republic.

I am therefore uniquely placed to say what I must now say, not as a political opponent, not as a stranger but as a brother to Riggy G. Brother Gachagua: Some of the attributes you have exhibited in recent weeks were not taught to us at the University of Nairobi. They were not taught at KIA. And they were certainly never modelled in the Office of the President.

We were not taught to call a visiting head of state of a G7 nation an "accomplice" at a press conference without evidence tested before a court. We were not taught that the correct response to 32 heads of state gathering on Kenyan soil to sign €23 billion in investments was to stand outside and call it a "sideshow." We were not taught that diplomatic summitry was a conspiracy. We were not taught that Kenya's elevation on the global stage was something to be undermined from within.

What we were taught is that a country is larger than any one of us. That the interest of the nation supersedes personal grievance. That the dignity of the office, even when you no longer hold it, must be preserved. That a public servant who rose through this Republic's ranks, who was trusted at its nerve centre, who was honoured with its highest decorations, carries that honour not as a trophy, but as a lifetime obligation.

What happened in Nairobi this week, Kenya co-chairing a historic France-Africa summit, the first ever held outside a Francophone country, Kenya signing 11 bilateral agreements that will transform infrastructure, energy, agriculture, healthcare, and the digital economy, was not a sideshow. It was Kenya's finest diplomatic hour.

Kenyans have seen their country stand tall. They are beaming with pride of being part of a Republic that no longer comes to the world table as a supplicant, but as a confident, sovereign equal, as President Ruto declared: "We should no longer think in terms of aid and loans, but in terms of investment and what Africa has to offer."

Brother Gachagua, the institutions that shaped us bind us in ways that transcend politics. And that is why, as a classmate, I am deeply troubled by what I have witnessed. You were always better than this. You understood service above self. You were a man who knew that a nation's progress belongs to all its citizens, regardless of who sits in the seat of power.

I implore you, as a brother, as a year mate, as a fellow servant who has borne this Republic's highest trust: Rethink. Reflect. The Kenya we dreamed about at UoN deserves better from both of us, and especially from you, having served the respected office of Deputy President.