On October 17, 2024, Kenya made constitutional history when the Senate voted to uphold the impeachment of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, making him the first person ever to be removed from the country’s second-highest office since the promulgation of the 2010 constitution. The landmark removal came just days after the National Assembly passed an impeachment motion by a sweeping margin, sending shockwaves through Kenya’s political landscape and marking an unprecedented moment in the nation’s democratic journey.
The process began on October 8, 2024, when Kenya’s National Assembly voted 281 to 44 in favor of impeaching Gachagua. Lawmakers cited a range of serious charges, including corruption, ethnic discrimination, and the deliberate undermining of President William Ruto’s administration. The scale of the vote underscored the extent to which Gachagua had lost political support within the ruling coalition, with more than six times as many MPs backing the motion as opposing it. Nine days later, the Senate deliberated on the eleven charges forwarded from the lower house and upheld five of them, formally completing the removal process and cementing Gachagua’s place in Kenya’s political history books.
Gachagua had been elected on the same ticket as President William Ruto in the 2022 general election, but relations between the two leaders had grown increasingly strained over the course of their time in office together. Reported disagreements over government policy direction, resource allocation, and Gachagua’s outspoken public style were widely cited as contributing factors to the breakdown of their political partnership. Kenya’s 2010 constitution had introduced, for the first time in the country’s history, a formal legal mechanism for the impeachment of a sitting deputy president — a provision that had existed on paper for over a decade before October 2024 finally put it to the test.
Gachagua and his legal representatives contested the removal vigorously in court, arguing that due process had been violated and that the proceedings were politically motivated rather than grounded in genuine constitutional concern. The legal challenges extended well into 2025, placing complex and novel constitutional questions before Kenya’s judiciary and keeping the matter prominently in the public eye long after the Senate had delivered its verdict. While the courts deliberated, a new deputy president was sworn into office and the government moved forward, though the unresolved legal proceedings continued to cast a long shadow over the legitimacy of the process.
The political fallout from the impeachment proved to reshape Kenya’s opposition landscape in ways few had anticipated. Rather than retreating from public life, Gachagua emerged as a prominent and energetic critic of the Ruto administration, becoming a rallying figure for those disillusioned with the government. The episode demonstrated, in the clearest possible terms, that the impeachment clause in the 2010 constitution is an active and enforceable instrument, not merely a theoretical safeguard. For Kenyan voters and future officeholders alike, the events of October 2024 set a lasting precedent — one that no position, however senior, is beyond the reach of democratic accountability.
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