With the DCP gaining ground and youth rage still simmering, Gachagua’s rebellion threatens to flip the Mountain from Ruto’s stronghold into his political graveyard.

By Arch. Dr. D.K. Gitau | Political Affairs Columnist

As the 2027 general elections inch closer, a silent rebellion is taking root in Kenya’s Mount Kenya region—a region that delivered over four million votes to William Ruto in 2022. But the political calculus has shifted. This time, the Mountain is speaking a different language—one of betrayal, bruises, and broken promises.

President Ruto’s old formula for winning the region—deploying loyalists like Kimani Ichung’wah, Moses Kuria, and Sabina Chege—has lost its charm. The faces may be familiar, but the trust is gone. The promises made have turned into the pain remembered.

The youth, once politically disengaged or co-opted by hollow economic slogans, have become the movement. They carry the scars of state violence—abductions, mysterious disappearances, and police killings that followed the 2023 and 2024 protests. They remember. And they will vote—or revolt—with that memory in 2027.

But the emerging threat to Ruto is not just grassroots discontent—it’s Rigathi Gachagua.

The Deputy President, once Ruto’s fiercest defender, has broken ranks and is building a formidable challenge through his newly formed party, the Democratic Consolidation Party (DCP). Armed with the resonant slogan “Onetum”—a Kikuyu call to reclaim, resist, and rise—Gachagua is shaking the foundations of a once-unified voting bloc.

What began as a whisper of defiance has grown into a political juggernaut giving Ruto sleepless nights. Gachagua, who knows the Mountain intimately, is weaponizing local frustration and positioning himself as the region’s unfiltered voice. With DCP, he taps into a well of historical resentment—against centralized power, dwindling economic returns, and what many see as betrayal by a presidency they helped create.

For the first time in decades, the Mountain is not merely a voting bloc—it is a battlefield. And Ruto may no longer be the general commanding its loyalty.

If 2022 was a landslide, 2027 will be a reckoning. The opposition will not need elaborate manifestos to win over the region—they will need only one line: ” Remember the abductions.” “Remember the missing. Remember the dead.” “Remember the broken promises.” NEVER AGAIN!

With Gachagua’s DCP splintering the vote, and the youth rallying behind a defiant spirit rather than party colors, Mount Kenya may very well be the electoral graveyard of Ruto’s second-term ambition.

History shows that no President can afford to lose his political STRONG BASE and still walk unscathed into reelection. And for William Ruto, the mountain that once crowned him, loved him, may now be the one that will bury his legacy forever.

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