Karanja quits UDA and targets Nakuru governorship on Gachagua’s DCP ticket
Nakuru County Senator Tabitha Keroche joins DCP
The Nakuru senator’s defection is the most significant Mount Kenya political realignment yet — and a direct challenge to President Ruto’s grip on a county he cannot afford to lose
By James Kimani
Nakuru County Senator Tabitha Karanja yesterday resigned from President William Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance and joined former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua’s Democracy for the Citizens Party, simultaneously declaring her intention to contest the Nakuru governorship on the DCP ticket in August 2027.
The defection is among the most consequential political movements in the Mount Kenya region since Gachagua launched DCP following his impeachment from the deputy presidency in October 2024. Karanja is not a peripheral figure. As Nakuru senator and founder of Keroche Breweries, one of Kenya’s most recognised homegrown brands, she carries both legislative standing and a business profile that commands national attention. Her departure from UDA is a calculated strike at the ruling party’s foundations in a county that delivered substantially for Ruto in 2022 and which he cannot afford to lose in 2027.
The timing is deliberate. With the general election ten months away, political formations across the Mount Kenya region are hardening rapidly. Gachagua’s DCP has spent recent weeks conducting intensive grassroots outreach — from Githunguri in Kiambu to Nakuru town — converting residual goodwill from his deputy presidency into organised electoral infrastructure. Karanja’s arrival gives that machinery a credible, high-profile candidate in one of the region’s most competitive and politically significant counties.
Nakuru is not ordinary electoral terrain. It is Kenya’s fourth-largest county by population, economically diverse, and home to a volatile mix of farming communities, urban professionals and Rift Valley constituencies that have historically swung between political camps. Whoever controls Nakuru’s county government wields considerable influence over regional political narratives. For Ruto, losing the county to a DCP candidate would represent both a symbolic and structural blow to his re-election campaign.
For Gachagua, the picture is different. The former deputy president has been methodically assembling a political coalition from Washington and Nairobi alike, directing his team’s ground operations remotely while building a public profile as the aggrieved representative of Mount Kenya’s unmet expectations under the Kenya Kwanza administration. Karanja’s defection strengthens that narrative considerably. A sitting senator, elected on UDA, publicly abandoning the party to stand on DCP’s ticket sends an unmistakable message to both the electorate and the political class: the exodus from Ruto’s coalition in the region is not over.
UDA has not yet responded publicly to Karanja’s announcement. The party will, however, face immediate pressure to field a credible alternative candidate in Nakuru — a task complicated by the fact that its most prominent county figures now find themselves on the opposite side of a rapidly widening political divide.
What is unfolding across Mount Kenya is not simply a series of individual defections. It is the organised dismantling of a political alliance, executed constituency by constituency, county by county, ahead of an election in which the region’s votes could again prove decisive.
Karanja has made her choice. Nakuru’s voters will make theirs in August.
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