Dear Rev. Dorcas Rigathi,
We write to you not with malice, but with the weary resignation of a nation forced to witness yet another spectacle from a man who once occupied the second-highest office in the land. Last evening, your hubby, and the former but now impeached Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, boarded a flight to the United States of America with all the theatrical gravitas of a villager embarking on his maiden voyage out of the country.
Reverend, we have watched you stand beside this man through several public debacles as he continues to embarrass the very office he was constitutionally ejected from. But this latest performance demands your urgent intervention, for it has crossed from mere political posturing into the realm of self-parody so profound that one wonders whether he has employed a full-time comedy scriptwriter.
The man who once claimed the Senate’s impeachment vote was a “crucifixion” now treats a transatlantic flight as though he were Neil Armstrong preparing for the moon landing. We are informed, through his own melodramatic social media dispatches, that he paused at the airport to address a motley gathering, waxing lyrical about his itinerary as if he were Ferdinand Magellan setting sail for uncharted waters. Indeed, at the rate he did things at the airport, one could have expected him to kiss the tarmac goodbye or plant a flag to commemorate his departure.
Reverend, Dorcas, your hubby is not the first Kenyan to board an aeroplane. Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport processes thousands of travellers daily, most of whom manage the feat without summoning the press or delivering a farewell address befitting a departing movie star. Yet here was Gachagua, dramatising a routine international flight with the wide-eyed wonder of a man who has just discovered that aeroplanes serve refreshments.
Your hubby’s travelling ensemble appeared carefully curated to project gravitas of a man who may have consulted a village council of elders before selecting his headgear. The entire production seemed designed to suggest that the United States of America had been awaiting his arrival with bated breath, when in truth, the only people tracking his flight path were a handful of journalists with nothing better to report.
We are told, Reverend, that this journey is ostensibly to attend to personal matters and perhaps to engage with the Kenyan diaspora. One struggles to imagine what wisdom he intends to export to Kenyans living abroad! The diaspora community, many of whom work diligently in hospitals, universities, and technology firms across America, deserve better than to be addressed by a man whose principal export these days is bitter complaint dressed as prophecy.
The world did not stop turning when his flight departed last evening. Nairobi’s traffic moved as it always does. Americans went about their business entirely unaware that a fallen deputy from Kenya. And Kenyans, for their part, have grown profoundly weary of a man who cannot seem to distinguish between relevance and volume.
What pains us most is your continued silence, Reverend Dorcas. You are a woman of the cloth, entrusted with spiritual guidance and moral teaching. Yet you stand by as your hubby reduces himself to a travelling exhibition of wounded vanity. Where is the wife who should have whispered, “Rigathi, you are no longer Deputy President, and boarding a plane is not a political statement”? Have you perhaps grown so accustomed to the buffoonery that it now seems ordinary?
Reverend Dorcas, we do not ask that you let go of your man, though heaven knows the evidence might support such a petition. We ask only that you perform the most basic duty of a wife and tell your hubby the truth. Tell him that grown men do not wave at departure gates like beauty queens on a float. Tell him that former Deputy Presidents do not document their airport walks as though they were royal processions. And tell him, above all, that Kenya has moved on, even if he has not.
The progression of your hubby from political figure to village spectacle is, in your case, nearly complete. The only question is whether you will act before Gachagua begins charging admission to his public appearances.
And by the way Reverend, when last did you check whether your hubby is indeed compos mentis? You better check before it is too late!
Yours in exhausted expectation,
A Concerned Nation
