The Sixty-Four Missing Pages: Why a Gap in Gachagua's Impeachment Judgment Unsettles Kenyans Watching From Abroad
A High Court upheld the former deputy president's removal, yet his lawyers say 64 pages and every judge's signature are missing from the official record.
On a Sunday evening in a flat in Manchester, a Kenyan nurse coming off a long shift did what tens of thousands of her compatriots abroad have done for months: she opened a family group chat to ask what the court had finally decided about Rigathi Gachagua. The answer that came back was not a clean verdict but a riddle. The judges had ruled. The impeachment stood. And yet, somewhere between the courtroom and the printer, sixty-four pages of the judgment had apparently gone missing.
For a diaspora that follows Kenyan politics the way others follow a championship season, the detail landed harder than the outcome. The removal of a deputy president is a constitutional earthquake. But a judgment that cannot be fully accounted for touches something more intimate to people who left home and now watch it from a distance: the question of whether the institutions back home still work the way they are supposed to.
What the court actually decided
The petition challenging Gachagua's removal was heard by a three-judge bench of the High Court, comprising Justices Eric Ogola, Anthony Mrima and Freda Mugambi. On 8 June 2026, after proceedings that ran for roughly ten hours, the bench delivered its decision. It was, by any measure, a split-screen result.
On one hand, the court found that Gachagua's right to a fair hearing under Article 50 of the Constitution had been violated during the Senate stage of his impeachment. On the other, the same bench upheld the impeachment itself, concluding that the overall process still met the constitutional thresholds required to remove him from office. In effect, the judges acknowledged a flaw in how he was treated while ruling that the flaw was not fatal to the result.
Gachagua has said he intends to challenge the decision at the Court of Appeal, noting that the Constitution sets out clear avenues for appeal and further review. For now, the High Court's ruling stands, and so does his removal.
The gap in the record
The controversy that has since overtaken the verdict is not about its reasoning but about its physical completeness. According to lawyers who were in court, Justice Ogola stated that the bench was issuing a judgment of 350 pages. The written version later supplied to the parties, however, ran to 286 pages. The arithmetic is simple and unsettling: sixty-four pages, by that account, are unaccounted for.
Gachagua's legal team has written to the court registry questioning whether the judgment on record is complete and authentic. They have also raised a second concern that is, if anything, more basic: the version handed to the parties carries no judicial signatures at all. In a case involving multiple petitioners and public institutions, including the National Assembly and its Speaker, the lawyers argue that any gap between what was pronounced in open court and what was later circulated raises real questions about transparency.
They are not alone in asking. Lawyers acting for the Gema Watho Association, listed as the 41st petitioner in the consolidated impeachment cases, have formally written to the Deputy Registrar of the Constitutional and Human Rights Division. They are seeking what they describe as the complete judgment, the typed proceedings, and the audiovisual recordings of the 8 June hearing, the better to compare what was said aloud with what now sits on the file.
An old wound reopened
The dispute has drawn comment from outside Gachagua's immediate camp. People's Liberation Party leader Martha Karua, one of Kenya's most prominent advocates, voiced concern about what she characterized as contradictory and inconsistent decisions in politically significant cases. She pointed back to her own experience in the 2017 Nyeri gubernatorial election petition, where, as she recalls it, the courts acknowledged procedural shortcomings and missing materials but dismissed her case anyway.
Karua's intervention matters because it reframes the missing pages as something larger than one politician's grievance. To her, the episode fits a pattern in which the machinery of justice produces results that the paperwork cannot fully explain. Whether or not one agrees with her reading, it is the kind of argument that travels well in diaspora forums, where distrust of process is often the first emotion and the facts arrive second.
Why a clerical mystery matters
It is tempting to file the sixty-four pages under bureaucratic mishap. Court registries are busy places, judgments in complex constitutional matters can run to hundreds of pages, and pagination errors are not unheard of. The High Court registry is now under pressure to explain the discrepancy and to establish whether it stems from a clerical error, a procedural irregularity, or a substantive omission. Until it does, the most innocent explanation and the most troubling one remain equally available.
That ambiguity is precisely the problem. A judgment is not merely an outcome; it is a record that allows citizens, including those scattered across Atlanta, London, Doha and Sydney, to see the reasoning and trust the result. When the document is incomplete and unsigned, the reasoning becomes harder to scrutinize and the result harder to accept, regardless of which way the case went.
The diaspora's stake
Kenyans abroad have a particular reason to care about how this resolves. Many of them send money home every month, invest in property they may never live in, and increasingly press for a stronger political voice from afar. Their confidence in that long-distance relationship rests on a quiet assumption: that the rule of law at home is durable enough to protect their interests when they are not there to defend them.
A missing set of pages does not, by itself, overturn that assumption. But it tests it. For the nurse in Manchester and the thousands like her, the next chapter will not be the headline that the impeachment was upheld. It will be the far less dramatic question of whether the registry can produce a complete, signed judgment, and whether the Court of Appeal, when it takes up Gachagua's challenge, is working from the full record or from an abridged one. In a story about power, the most consequential characters may turn out to be the pages nobody can find.
