Matiang’i breaks silence on DCP’s Mt Kenya grip, Jubilee’s future and the Nyoro war
Jubilee Deputy Party Leader Fred Matiang'i
The Jubilee presidential hopeful says 120 days is all he needs — but the mountain’s political arithmetic may not be so accommodating
By Grace Wanja
Jubilee Deputy Party Leader Fred Matiang’i yesterday broke his characteristic public reticence to address the three questions dominating Mt Kenya’s political conversation: the growing dominance of Rigathi Gachagua’s Democracy for the Citizens Party in the region, the accelerating haemorrhage of members from Jubilee, and the bitter public feud between Gachagua and Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro that is threatening to fracture the opposition before it has even settled on a presidential candidate.
Speaking on a local media station, Matiang’i was notably measured on Jubilee’s defections, projecting calm where his party’s secretary general, Moitalel Ole Kenta, has sounded increasingly defensive. “I have no problem with anyone defecting from Jubilee and joining other parties within the united opposition,” Matiang’i said. “We are all championing the same cause. We are in the political transfer season, and it is democratic for them to do so.” The conciliatory framing masked a harder political reality: Jubilee has been losing members to DCP at a pace that has rattled its grassroots structures, with Kamukunji MP Yusuf Hassan and eleven constituency chairpersons the latest to cross to Gachagua’s party.
On campaigning, Matiang’i was equally composed. Asked why he had not been crisscrossing the country with the urgency the 2027 calendar seems to demand, he offered an answer that was either supremely confident or strategically opaque. “People have been asking me why I am not campaigning. I don’t need to campaign daily. One hundred and twenty days are enough for me,” he said. Whether the electorate will agree is another matter entirely. A TIFA Research poll released yesterday found that 76 per cent of Kenyans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction — the highest reading since tracking began in March 2023 — with opposition backing still split among Matiang’i, Kalonzo Musyoka, Edwin Sifuna and Gachagua, a fragmentation that continues to work in President William Ruto’s favour.
The Gachagua-Nyoro conflict has introduced fresh instability into a mountain region the opposition desperately needs to deliver as a unified bloc. Gachagua’s allies have accused Nyoro’s newly launched People’s Party of Kenya of being a state-sponsored vehicle designed to split the Mt Kenya vote, a charge Nyoro has flatly denied. Matiang’i’s response was telling in what it chose to signal rather than say directly — he publicly congratulated Nyoro on the PPK launch, writing that he “enthusiastically looked forward to engaging and collaborating” with the new party. The gesture was read in political circles as a deliberate positioning move: Matiang’i signalling openness to every opposition formation, including ones that Gachagua regards as hostile.
The mountain’s political arithmetic remains deeply unsettled. DCP’s Ol Kalou by-election victory reinforced Gachagua’s claim to regional dominance, dealt Jubilee a bruising setback and left Matiang’i’s path to the presidency dependent on a unity of purpose that the opposition has so far managed to proclaim more convincingly than it has demonstrated.
Eleven months remain. The knocking, as Matiang’i himself has said, has begun. Whether anyone answers the door is the question that will define 2027.
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