On 8 June 2026, more than twenty months after the Senate voted him out of office, a three judge Bench of the High Court at Nairobi delivered its long awaited verdict on the removal of former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua. The judgment, in the consolidated Constitutional Petition No. E565 of 2024, runs to several hundred pages. Yet its essence can be stated in a single, uncomfortable sentence. The court found that Mr Gachagua’s rights were violated; then it let his removal stand.
That paradox is the whole story. It is also the reason this matter is far from over.
The brief facts
Mr Gachagua was elected Deputy President alongside President William Ruto in the General Election of 9 August 2022. The partnership did not survive its first term. On 1 October 2024, the Member for Kibwezi West, Hon. Mwengi Mutuse, moved an impeachment motion under Articles 145 and 150 of the Constitution, citing eleven grounds ranging from gross violation of the Constitution to gross misconduct, insubordination and incitement. The National Assembly approved the motion. The Senate, sitting as the trial chamber, upheld five of the charges and voted to remove him on the night of 17 October 2024. The very next day the President nominated Prof. Kithure Kindiki, and the National Assembly approved him within hours.
Mr Gachagua and dozens of co petitioners rushed to court, eighteen petitions in all, consolidated into one. They asked the court to declare the entire process unconstitutional. By the time of judgment, Mr Gachagua had quietly dropped his prayer for reinstatement and was pressing chiefly for vindication, damages and a declaration that he had been wronged.
What the court actually decided
The Bench was emphatic on most of the contested ground. It held that impeachment is justiciable, that the allegations of bias against the Speakers and members were bare political suspicion rather than evidence, that public participation met the constitutional threshold and that the impugned Standing Orders were not unconstitutional. It affirmed the nomination of Prof. Kindiki as valid. On these questions, the petitioners lost.
Then came the twist. On the question of fair trial under Articles 47 and 50, the court found in Mr Gachagua’s favour. The Senate, it held, infringed his rights when it declined to grant an adjournment and proceeded with the hearing despite knowing he had been hospitalised and could not mount his defence. For that violation the court awarded him constitutional damages of fifty million shillings, payable by the Senate, and declared that Parliament must urgently enact a dedicated statutory framework for the removal of a Deputy President under Article 150.
But the court refused to quash the impeachment. Its reasoning was that Article 145(7) renders the Senate’s resolution final and automatically operative, and that to set it aside would resurrect Mr Gachagua into an office now lawfully occupied, producing the constitutional absurdity of two Deputy Presidents at once.
The fence the court chose to sit on
Here lies the deepest difficulty with the judgment, and it deserves to be named plainly.
The law on a denial of a fair hearing is old, settled and unsentimental. Where a person is condemned without being heard, the decision is tainted at its root. The orthodox common law position, long received into Kenyan jurisprudence, is that such a breach vitiates the decision itself. The court does not pause to ask whether a proper hearing would have changed the outcome, because the right to be heard is not a formality to be weighed on a scale of consequences. It is the very condition of legitimacy.
The Bench, having found that Mr Gachagua’s fair trial rights were infringed, then declined to draw the natural conclusion. It reasoned, in effect, that the violation was real but not weighty enough to undo the result, since the constitutional finality of Article 145(7) and the spectre of dual incumbency stood in the way. Stripped of its constitutional dressing, this is a materiality threshold, a quiet inquiry into whether the breach mattered enough to matter. That threshold is foreign to the law of natural justice. It belongs nowhere near a finding that a man was tried while lying in a hospital bed.
The court had two honest paths before it. It could have been brave and held that the breach of fair trial vitiated the impeachment, with all the disruption that would have followed. Or it could have been candid and held that, on the facts, his fair trial rights were not infringed at all. Instead it did both and neither. It vindicated the right with one hand and withheld the remedy with the other, then softened the contradiction with fifty million shillings. A finding without a remedy is a half judgment. The Constitution deserves a court willing to follow its own logic to the end.
Why Mr Gachagua can still dream of State House
The political reading is where this becomes genuinely consequential, and it is the part that should interest every strategist watching 2027.
Impeachment under Article 145 does one thing and one thing only. It ends a tenure. It does not, on the face of the Constitution, impose any automatic bar on the impeached office holder ever seeking office again. There is no clause that extinguishes Mr Gachagua’s political future the way some constitutions banish their fallen leaders.
Eligibility for the presidency is governed by Article 137, which requires, among other things, that a candidate be qualified to stand for election as a Member of Parliament under Article 99. The only realistic route by which the impeachment could disqualify him would be a conclusive finding, in accordance with the law, that he contravened Chapter Six on leadership and integrity within the meaning of Article 99(2). A Senate vote that is itself the subject of a pending appeal is not such a conclusive finding. So long as Mr Gachagua appeals, and so long as that appeal is not yet heard and determined, no settled disqualification crystallises against him.
The practical consequence is striking. As the law stands today, nothing in this judgment closes the door on a Rigathi Gachagua presidential bid. The fifty million shilling award and the formal declaration that his rights were trampled hand him something a politician prizes far more than money: a vindication narrative. He walks out of court able to say, with a judicial stamp, that he was wronged. In Kenyan politics, the wronged man is rarely the finished man.
Who truly wins
The disappointed party has already announced what everyone expected. The matter is headed to the Court of Appeal, and from there, in all likelihood, to the Supreme Court. The constitutional questions the High Court tried to settle, the finality of impeachment, the reach of judicial review and the remedy for a violated right, will be reopened, reargued and re decided.
And so we arrive at the quiet truth beneath all the constitutional grandeur. In a contest this long, this bitter and this richly funded, the surest winners are not the petitioners or the respondents. They are the advocates, who will bill another round of submissions, another bench, another appeal. And there are the media houses, for whom every twist in the Gachagua saga is a fresh harvest of headlines and clicks. The Constitution may struggle to find closure. The lawyers and the newsrooms will find none necessary. Justice is in no hurry, and neither, it seems, are the fees.
MOkua Manyara
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