Deputy President Professor Kithure Kindiki has sent what many are interpreting as a deeply sinister and carefully coded message to his predecessor Rigathi Gachagua, suggesting that the former Deputy President may be living on borrowed time.
Gachagua, who was controversially impeached in 2024, has since transformed himself into one of the most ferocious and effective critics of President William Ruto’s administration. His growing influence and unapologetic combativeness have clearly rattled those at the top of the ruling establishment, with Ruto’s allies becoming increasingly vocal in their desire to see him silenced by whatever means necessary.
The alarm bells had already started ringing earlier this week when former Gatundu South MP Moses Kuria posted a cryptic message on X comparing Gachagua to imprisoned East African opposition leaders, a post widely interpreted as a hint that Gachagua could soon be arrested or worse.
Now Kindiki has added his own chilling layer to the threatening atmosphere surrounding Kenya’s most prominent opposition figure.
Speaking at Kinoru Stadium in Meru on Saturday, where he was addressing United Democratic Alliance(UDA) delegates, Kindiki declared that Gachagua’s days in Kenyan politics were numbered and that his era of insulting the President and dividing Mt Kenya along ethnic lines was rapidly drawing to a close. But it was the language he chose to deliver that message that has set the country on edge.
“You believe that you can be voted for because you engage in foolish and childish things? And then you take pride in calling yourself a hero simply because you came up with a nickname for the President, as if that is some great achievement? That is not how it works. Then another person calls himself a hero because he gave the Deputy President a nickname,” Kindiki said.
He then reached for a phrase drawn directly from the Book of Daniel in the Bible, a passage historically associated with divine judgment and imminent destruction.
“I announce to you today, Mene, Mene, Tekel. Your days in politics have been counted. You have been weighed and found wanting. Your days in politics are numbered,” Kindiki declared.
In the Book of Daniel, the phrase Mene Mene Tekel appeared as a supernatural warning on the wall during the feast of King Belshazzar, foretelling his death and the fall of his kingdom that very night. For a Deputy President to invoke those specific words against a political opponent, in a public stadium, before a cheering crowd, goes far beyond ordinary political rhetoric.
Combined with Murkomen’s arrest warnings, Kuria’s prison comparisons, and now Kindiki’s biblical prophecy of doom, the message being directed at Gachagua from multiple corners of the ruling establishment is becoming harder and harder to dismiss as mere political bluster.
Kenya is watching. And Gachagua would be wise to watch his back.
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