Deputy President Kithure Kindiki addresses congregants during a thanksgiving service at the Full Gospel Churches of Kenya in Embu County, on January 5, 2025.
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players...,” so wrote William Shakespeare. The Kenyan political stage is like a theatre — vast, eventful and suspenseful.
For Deputy President Kithure Kindiki, however, this stage is without drama. Like someone with one hand on the fire alarm, he entered a blazing DP’s office — the debris of an impeached former occupant whose part in the play had ended swiftly and the curtain had fallen abruptly in a frightening game with the hero and villain arcs in one continuum. Like a substitute actor, Prof Kindiki stepped into Act 2 of a turbulent play already in motion, with no script and no clear stage directions.
As the year 2025 started, social media was awash with questions of where the DP was. When he appeared in public, he explained that “Some people wonder how I got here because of how quiet I am”.
As someone who was in campus with the DP at Moi University, I am not surprised. In the theatre of life, he is a quiet, “No Drama Kindiki”. He is the kind of performer satisfied with working intensely hard but keeping a low profile without boyish enthusiasm or wild exuberance.
In campus, he was no politician and was always overshadowed by others. He was eclipsed by his classmate Hassan Omar who was a fiery student leader and Chairman of the Moi University Students Organisation (MUSO). One of the things I remember about Hon Kindiki as a student is that though he seemed purposeful and grounded, he always took the backseat — he wasn’t the kind to call attention to himself by shaking the pavement as he walked, shattering windows or parting a crowd like a ship in water.
Though he was very active in the Christian Union, he was eclipsed by others except the few times he preached to us. In the Christian Union meetings, there was the swell of gospel music, the preaching and a breeze. Always, there was a breeze. Hope wafting like air. But even after the music had stopped, and we had said “Amen”, amidst the reading in campus, dreaming, secret tears and a lingering sense of uncertainty, the young Kindiki probably saw a vision of his future.
As students, the future was always steeped in mystery. We had the idealistic optimism of youth — with an intoxicating whiff — before it was tempered by reality and coloured by regret and the burden of the years.
Over two decades have passed since that time in campus. From media reports, Moi University, now like a misremembered Jerusalem, seems to have fallen into hard times, its image long ago demolished. And in myself, too, as Marcel Proust would put it, “many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen”.
I wonder if from our university days, Hon Kindiki was conscious of a stirring call that would carry him far away from the green lawns of Moi University to almost the apex of Kenyan politics. Maybe in his lowly associations with other students, he learnt details about the lives of others, their simple joys, their secret struggles, their unnoticed sorrows — priceless pieces of knowledge both for the future lawyer and DP.
Hon Kindiki was flung into the national political limelight when he was elected Senator for Tharaka-Nithi County from 2013-2022. On May 16, 2022, he addressed the media, saying: “I have taken the decision to take a break from elective politics, starting 10 August 2022… However, I will remain available to my country in future should an opportunity arise to seek leadership positions that may be available at the national level in the future. That future, I don’t know when it will be”. Then he walked away from it all.
For a time, Hon Kindiki was without any political position. He remained a civilian for some time, living, it would seem, as in the quiet and maybe happier days before the earthquake of his public career, but as Alexander Maclaren would put it, “with deeper thoughts and new power, with broader experience, and a wider horizon, until the hour when he was finally wrenched from his seclusion, and flung into the whirlpool” of national politics. The future he had said he didn’t know had come.
The future comes suddenly for Hon Kindiki. From his campus days and also as seen when he took a break from elective politics, Hon Kindiki has a calm indifference to his outward circumstances. He can be described in the words of a writer describing someone else, “he accepts whatever happens with equanimity… Prosperity comes unsought, and dangers unfeared”.
If he is given a position, he takes it and does his work. If his high position is taken from him, he is quite content with a lower one. If favour is offered, he accepts it; if it is withdrawn, he goes home. If his critics ask where he is, he sends a short message on social media; he is not ruffled.
We wish him well as he takes up his role in the theatre that is Kenyan politics — his performance on that stage has great implications for the country.
The writer is a book publisher based in Nairobi. [email protected]
