Governor Vs Deputy: When Power Turns Petty and Government Becomes a Siege
By Martin Masai
What is unfolding in Machakos is no longer a quiet disagreement between a governor and her deputy. No. They are at daggers drawn.
It is a deeply -burning institutional crisis — a governor at war not only with her deputy, but with the County Assembly itself, sections of the cabinet and increasingly, with whole sections of the county.
From the very formation of government, Governor Wavinya Ndeti’s relationship with her deputy, Francis Mwangangi, was adversarial.
The feud did not emerge later; it was embedded in the way power was hoarded and dissent punished.
The law is unambiguous. Section 32 of the County Governments Act establishes the Office of the Deputy Governor as a constitutional one, mandating the deputy to deputise the governor and perform assigned functions. In Machakos, however, the office has been reduced to a shell — starved, humiliated, and functionally paralysed.
Mwangangi was never formally assigned duties. His initial defense of Governor Wavinya has everporated, thanks to the realities he must confront with urgency.
His office exists without an accounting officer. For three consecutive financial years, the county budget has allocated zero funding to the Office of the Deputy Governor. No stationery. No fuel. No Daily Subsistence Allowance. No operational support of any kind. Even office tea became a luxury.
Initially, there was a polite fiction that the office would survive on logistical “support” from the Governor’s office. That fiction collapsed when, according to insiders, the governor ordered all such support frozen.Then came the degradations.
The deputy’s official vehicle — a state resource attached to his office — was seized and reassigned to the County Secretary, Dr Muya Ndambuki. Later, his remaining vehicles were grabbed again. On one occasion, the seizure occurred in front of his family. For nearly three years now, his official fleet has reportedly been held in private garages linked to individuals close to the governor.
To attend public functions, the Deputy Governor hires vehicles or fuels his own.This is not political rivalry. It is administrative strangulation.
The Office of the Deputy Governor has been without electricity for six months. The cruelty is structural: the office occupies a former cold storage facility with narrow windows, unusable without power. Mwangangi personally uses Kes 24,000 to run a generator so that the office can merely exist.
Office sources say appeared in office once in the last three months — not out of indifference, but because the office itself has been rendered uninhabitable. When desperate residents seek school fees or medical help, he comes.
The political betrayal deepened when an early power-sharing understanding — that the administration would be inclusive and balanced between the governor’s supporters and those aligned to the deputy — was discarded without ceremony.
The long-whispered arrangement that one side would serve ten years before yielding to the other was publicly trashed.Still, Mwangangi endured.Until now.“Our framework is over,” he has reportedly told confidants. “I will face her at the ballot.”That declaration has exposed a fault line that has long been denied but keenly felt: a growing rupture between Machakos’ green highlands — Machakos Town, Mavoko, Kathiani and Kangundo — and the arid lowlands, whose people increasingly speak of themselves as Andu ma Weuni. What was once a county is now hardening into political camps.But the deputy governor is not the only casualty.
Governor Ndeti is also locked in a bruising confrontation with the County Assembly, an institution that has increasingly resisted what it views as executive overreach. Relations between the executive and the assembly are described by insiders as being at a full boil — marked by mutual suspicion, stalled cooperation, and open hostility.
Budget approvals have become battlegrounds. Oversight has been met with defiance. Some MCAs complain of marginalisation and intimidation; the executive complains of sabotage.
The result is paralysis — a county where the executive fights its deputy, scuffles with its legislature, and governs through confrontation rather than consensus.
A recent incident captured the dysfunction starkly. Sources say the County Secretary summoned the Deputy Governor for an assignment — triggering a bitter exchange that laid bare the complete collapse of internal trust within the county’s top leadership.
This is no longer governance. It is siege warfare.A governor who starves a constitutional office of budget, vehicles, electricity and dignity — while simultaneously waging war on the County Assembly — is not merely asserting authority. She is assaulting institutions.Section 32 of the County Governments Act does not grant governors the power to extinguish the Deputy Governor’s office through neglect. Nor does the Constitution license perpetual conflict between arms of county government.
Machakos is fast becoming a cautionary tale: of how personal vendettas, when fused with unchecked executive power, hollow out institutions and fracture communities. The tragedy is not just that leaders are at war.It is that an entire county is being governed as collateral damage.
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