‘Things Fall Apart’, Gachagua, Kindiki and Mount Kenya battle

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

Like ancient English lords contesting feudal greatness, Rigathi Gachagua and Deputy President Kithure Kindiki are close to open gang warfare, each striving to seize a big pie of the Mount Kenya voting block.

The two men are hurtling towards an inevitable collision course, the ground beneath them turning into a vortex, each man spinning faster and faster as the centrifugal force flings them to a dramatic showdown.

As they take in the crosswinds under the shimmering Mount Kenya horizon, the colossal pressure of their two atmospheres becomes more tense as each man advances and takes a last stand.

As the two political leaders traverse the country in various political rallies, sweating and touched by something like a far-flung ray, their faces catch and keep all the sun.

Beyond the beauty of the greenery around their rallies, flowers shooting forth, purple and satin-soft, the cooing of distant pigeons, the dazzling brightness, and the promise of fine days, Gachagua and Kindiki are waging a vicious and relentless political fight.

The two men, however, are fighting in completely different ways. Gachagua, always seemingly on the edge of insurrection, is the idea of a defender — the blunt, unvarnished custodian of grievance and regional pride, the “son of the soil,” the one who loudly names and points at opponents openly and promises protection.

A grittier, angry Gachagua wants to take over Mt Kenya. Sometimes he looks like a man a long way away, though one never quite knows from where. His political journey has a sense of time slowed, mastered, lost and then regained. Yet, at other times, he looks like a man who has arrived, a king on his throne.

Kindiki, by contrast, is the idea of the calm jurist, the disciplined statesman, the man who speaks softly but carries the authority of law and order. In literature, Kindiki matches Chinua Achebe’s character named Obierika in Things Fall Apart.

Gachagua’s political style matches the character Okonkwo in the same book. Like Okonkwo, Gachagua is often intense, confrontational, and combustible. He has the same restless fire of Okonkwo, who, “whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, would use his fists.”

Okonkwo mistook gentleness for cowardice, so he was loud, unruly, and unfettered. He was a man of a violent temper. When cutting yams, his son Nwoye cuts them too small for planting, and Okonkwo barks at him, “‘Do you think you are cutting up yams for cooking?’ he asked Nwoye.

‘If you split another yam of this size, I shall break your jaw.’”

But Kindiki’s style is the opposite, like Obierika: quiet, procedural, and unhurried. Obierika was Okonkwo’s friend who stays behind when the rest of the village charges forward.

But Obierika was more than a friend; he was Okonkwo’s moral counterweight, confidant, and the one man in Umuofia who consistently weighs the import of his actions.

Where Okonkwo leaps, Obierika pauses; where Gachagua thunders, Kindiki responds calmly, in a lawyerly pause.

There are many ways in which Kindiki is like Achebe’s Obierika. Firstly, like Obierika who “thought about things” where lesser men merely reacted to them, Kindiki thinks before uttering words.

He doesn’t “shoot first and aim later.” Kindiki, twenty-four years at the bar and the lectern before he was ever a senator, has built an identical Obierika reputation: the man who reads the brief thoroughly before he signs it.

Secondly, Kindiki is like Obierika, who is close to the councils of Umuofia society but is never intoxicated by proximity to power. In the same way, Kindiki has not allowed himself to be intoxicated by power in his rise from Head of the Department of Public Law at thirty-three to Senate Majority Leader to Cabinet Secretary to the deputy presidency.

He has stood beside power soberly for two decades without ever appearing to grasp for it, which is why, when the vacancy at the deputy presidency finally opened following Gachagua's impeachment, it fell to him rather than to any of the louder aspirants thirsting for it.

Thirdly is the fact prudence leads to survival. Obierika endures Umuofia's convulsions — especialy the slow fracturing of the clan under colonial pressure — by thinking things through and adapting correctly.

It is Obierika who tells Okonkwo that the white man's religion has won over their own kinsmen and that “our clan can no longer act like one.” In the way, Kindiki has outlasted louder men by correctly reading the room and adapting.

None of this should flatten the comparison into flattery. Obierika's caution can sometimes be seen as passivity; he mourns Okonkwo's exile without ever quite intervening to prevent the tragedies that follow.

Kindiki's critics make the same charge — that his celebrated restraint is, at bottom, a career built on not offending anyone.

However, he has shown he can stand his ground, as he did on August 15, 2026, when he addressed Gachagua: “I do not call you my brother because I love you. And I do not call you my brother because I fear you. I call you my brother because the elders of our communities... are one. Therefore, you are my brother by blood, not by choice.”

Reporting originally appeared via Nation Africa. Read the full source for additional context.