Gachagua's last legal gambit: an appeal that accepts only five paragraphs of a 286-page judgment

On 23 June 2026, lawyers for former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua filed a notice of appeal at Kenya's Court of Appeal, challenging the High Court judgment that had upheld his impeachment by the National Assembly in October 2024. The filing, reported by the Daily Nation, takes issue with most of the ruling while explicitly conceding the court's findings on a single charge — the arithmetic is as telling as the politics behind it: of the 286 pages the court produced, Gachagua's team says it is satisfied with only five.

The narrower reading is procedural. A notice of appeal is a marker, not a final pleading, and litigants routinely dispute almost every paragraph of an adverse judgment as a way of preserving every conceivable ground for the appellate bench. The wider reading is political. By publicly itemising the paragraphs he rejects and the one paragraph-range he accepts, Gachagua is performing a kind of legal inventory for his supporters, signalling that the constitutional drama that removed him from office is, in his telling, almost entirely indefensible — and that he is willing to spend the next several years saying so in court.

The case in five paragraphs

Gachagua was impeached by the National Assembly on 9 October 2024 on a package of charges that included incitement, undermining the president, corruption-related accusations, and the violation of several constitutional provisions. The High Court's full bench, sitting in Nairobi, dismissed his petition and upheld the ouster, finding that the process had substantially complied with the constitution and that parliament had acted within its mandate. The judgment ran to 286 pages. Gachagua's legal team has now filed notice of appeal against the bulk of those findings, while accepting, in its own words, the narrowest set of paragraphs that addressed the specific allegation of constitutional violation tied to one of the charges.

That selective acceptance is doing real work. It allows the former deputy president to argue, in effect, that even the court that upheld his removal agreed on at least one point that the process was not perfect — a small but politically useful concession in a country where impeachment is widely read as a proxy for the internal power struggle between the former deputy president and his onetime boss, President William Ruto. It is also, on the defence side, a way of avoiding the accusation that the appeal is bad faith: by conceding one finding, Gachagua's lawyers insulate themselves against the charge that they are contesting a judgment they have not actually read.

The political economy of an appeal

Kenyan impeachments rarely end at the High Court. The 2003 bid against then-vice president Kalanzo Musyoka and the 2021 effort against Bomet governor Hillary Barchok both generated appellate filings; some of the country's most consequential constitutional questions of the last two decades were settled at the Court of Appeal in Nairobi rather than in the lower benches. The institutional incentive structure is well understood by senior counsel: a defeat at first instance costs little if the record can be reopened on appeal, and a sympathetic appellate ruling can convert a personal humiliation into a constitutional precedent.

Gachagua's position has additional features. As a major figure in the Mount Kenya political establishment — a region that has, since 2002, supplied the country's president or deputy in every electoral cycle — he retains a clientelist base that no court ruling has yet eroded. An appeal buys time, and time is the currency of Kenyan coalition politics. The longer a former deputy president can keep his legal file active, the longer his name stays in the conversation inside his home region and among the wider opposition-aligned networks that have been looking for a credible figure to rally around ahead of the 2027 cycle.

The counter-reading is that the appeal is largely a holding action, and that Gachagua's camp knows it. Courts of Appeal in Kenya are cautious about overturning factual findings of lower benches, particularly when those findings rest on the assembly's own assessment of its procedures. A sympathetic ruling would, in effect, require the appellate judges to say that the High Court misread the record on points that the National Assembly itself controlled — a high bar.

What the next eighteen months look like

If the Court of Appeal admits the appeal, briefing will run through the second half of 2026 and into 2027; oral arguments are unlikely before the second quarter of next year. If the appellate court rules in Gachagua's favour on any substantive ground, the case can be returned to the High Court for redetermination, which would effectively re-open the substantive challenge to his removal. If it rules against him, the only remaining domestic avenue is the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court of Kenya has historically been sparing in its intervention in political disputes that turn on the assembly's internal procedures.

The wider stakes are constitutional. Kenya's 2010 constitution was drafted in part to constrain the use of impeachment as a tool of executive factional politics, and the Gachagua case is the first major test of those provisions against a sitting deputy president. A ruling that narrows the assembly's discretion will be read, in Ruto's camp, as a constraint on a legitimate parliamentary remedy. A ruling that widens judicial review of the impeachment process will be read, in Gachagua's camp, as the constitution finally catching up with the reality of how power is actually removed in Nairobi.

What remains uncertain

The sources do not yet specify which paragraphs of the 286-page judgment Gachagua's team has formally accepted, only that the concession covers "five paragraphs" of the findings on the constitutional-violation charge. They do not disclose which of the original impeachment grounds the appeal will lead with, nor whether Gachagua intends to seek interim orders freezing any related proceedings in the meantime. The Court of Appeal's own calendar — and whether the case is assigned to a bench that has previously ruled on impeachment-related petitions — will also shape the timeline. Until those procedural questions are answered, the appeal is best read as a marker of intent: a former deputy president signalling, in the most formal language available to him, that he intends to fight every step of the way.

This piece is filed from Nairobi; Monexus led with the Daily Nation and Standard reporting on the filing itself rather than on the underlying impeachment politics, on the principle that the news today is procedural, not constitutional.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/DailyNation/
• https://t.me/StandardKenya/