Author: Our Correspondent

She was his deputy director of communications. She sat in on strategy sessions, drafted his public statements and watched, up close, how Rigathi Gachagua operated.

Now Martha Miano, who served in that capacity in the Office of the Deputy President before Gachagua fired her in August 2024, has turned the full force of what she knows against the man she once served, and what she has put into words is nothing short of dynamite.

In a lengthy and furious Facebook post that she makes no effort to retract, Miano has accused the former Deputy President and now aspiring 2027 presidential candidate of impregnating and causing the deaths of two university students, one from Murang’a and one from Nyeri, while he held the second highest office in the land. She has further accused him of impregnating the wife of his late brother.

She has named the Olivia Gardens property in what she describes as a fraud against his deceased brother’s children.

And she has made the most explosive allegation of all: that Gachagua hatched a plan, in a private office he called “mlima,” to have his former personal assistant Francis Ngotho Maina killed, paying a down payment of five million shillings to hitmen before Ngotho was saved by one of those same hitmen.

Gachagua has not publicly responded to the specific allegations contained in Miano’s post.

The Woman Who Refused to Be Silenced

To understand what has pushed Miano to this point, one must understand her history with Gachagua. She was among the bloggers he hired when he was building his political communications machinery, brought in for her digital footprint and Kikuyu community reach.

She rose within his orbit to become Deputy Director of Public Communications, a formal government posting. She was, by all accounts, effective and visible.

Then in August 2024, as Gachagua’s feud with President William Ruto was reaching its boiling point, both Miano and Ngotho received termination letters citing incompetence.

The letters, dated August 20, 2024, arrived via social media before either of them had seen the originals. Miano, characteristically, handled it with public grace at the time, telling followers she walked away with her head high and her conscience clear.

But Gachagua, it appears, would not leave her alone.

In her Facebook post, Miano says that even while she was pregnant, Gachagua was calling around asking who the father of her child was, attempting to humiliate her publicly.

She says she had on a prior occasion already made clear she would never be in a romantic relationship with him, calling him “an old man, old enough to be my father.” She accuses him of having sent bloggers to attack her personal life, and says he brought her father, whom she refers to as “Baba Wairimu,” to Mombasa specifically to badmouth her on the first day of 2024.

It is in response to all of this, she says, that she has chosen to fight back. And she has chosen to fight with receipts.

The Girls Who Wrote Notes to Their Unborn Children

The most devastating allegations in Miano’s post concern two young women she says Gachagua impregnated during his tenure as Deputy President. She describes them as girls from poor rural backgrounds, aged between twenty and twenty-three, who she says were targeted precisely because of their vulnerability.

“These girls cannot speak up for themselves to tell a man of that stature to use protection,” she writes. “Those ones from the village have no idea how contraceptives are used or even where to get them. And at that age they are also super fertile so one wrong move, they get pregnant.”

Miano is not speaking into a vacuum. One of those cases already has a documented public record that trails directly to Nyeri and to a young woman who, in the weeks before her death, wrote a Valentine’s Day message to her unborn child.

Her name was Regina Wairimu. She was twenty-two years old, a fourth-year Telecommunications and Electrical Engineering student at Dedan Kimathi University in Nyeri County.

In January 2023, she had formally deferred her studies, her university records showing she was seven and a half months pregnant at the time.

In one of her notebooks, she left a message for her child that has since haunted everyone who has read it: “To my unborn son: I love you. My Baby Daddy is bringing complications since he is powerful and influential. But I must give birth to you and show you momma love.”

On February 12, 2023, Regina was pronounced dead. Her baby was found dead inside a travelling bag. A post-mortem conducted by Dr. Bill Muriuki on February 17 found multiple lesions on the walls of her uterus and products of conception still inside her.

The cause of death was recorded as severe haemorrhage. The baby was eight and a half months into gestation.

Police investigations established that Regina had arrived at a bedsitter in Kangemi estate, Nyeri, at approximately 2 am on the night in question, in the company of two women. Blood stains were found on the carpet and in the bathroom.

There was evidence of a deliberate attempt to clean it off. The two women accompanying Regina told police the stains were from menstrual blood.

They said the three of them had been at a Nyeri bar where Regina had gone to meet her “influential baby daddy,” who was accompanied at the bar by his personal DJ. Regina and the baby daddy, according to these women, left the club together before returning minus the man shortly after 1:30 am.

By 10 am the next morning, Regina could no longer walk. She was carried to a taxi by the two women and two male tenants and driven to the university health centre, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. The taxi was carrying two safari bags.

The two women tried to distance themselves from the bags. The ambulance driver loaded them into the vehicle anyway. At Nyeri Level Five Referral Hospital, the bags were opened. One contained a dead foetus. The other contained bloody clothing.

Regina’s family buried mother and child in a single casket in Macegeca village. Her mother, Elizabeth Wambui, told reporters at the time: “If it was an abortion she needed, we are not a poor family and she could have tricked us into sending her money. She could not have sought a study deferment of nine months so as to go seeking a crude abortion.” Her father, Kenneth Kinyanjui, described what he was seeing as “manipulation, stage management and a deliberate push to sell a narrative that is illogical, illiterate and outright unacceptable.”

Fresh details that have circulated since point to a cover-up involving a prominent Nyeri politician.

Shortly after Regina’s death, a young woman and a male companion reportedly visited the family in a luxury vehicle, offering to settle the matter and make it disappear.

The family refused. Forensic investigators noted that Regina’s phone had been formatted to erase all records. Witnesses went silent. No one has been charged. The case remains open.

The family of Regina Wairimu now wants Rigathi Gachagua to come clean.

That is their position on record. Kenya Insights has also been informed of a second case involving a young woman from Murang’a County, also described as being in her early twenties, also said to have been pregnant by a powerful man whose identity has not been publicly established.

The details of that case have not been independently verified by this publication, but Miano references it explicitly in her Facebook post, asking Gachagua by name: “Do you know this 22-year-old girl from Murang’a who was killed pregnant?”

The Ngotho Plot: A Down Payment to Kill

If the allegations involving the two students represent Gachagua’s alleged cruelty toward the powerless, Miano’s allegations about Francis Ngotho Maina represent something else entirely: the alleged elimination of inconvenient insiders.

Ngotho served as Gachagua’s personal assistant from his days as Mathira Member of Parliament through his time as Deputy President.

He was, by all accounts that have since emerged, one of the most trusted men in Gachagua’s inner circle. Ngotho held access to the former DP’s private affairs, his schedules, his conversations, his secrets.

Then came the impeachment in October 2024. Ngotho did not go down with his boss. Five days after the Senate upheld Gachagua’s removal from office, Ngotho resurfaced, now aligned with the other side.

A letter from State House formalized his transition. Gachagua, according to multiple sources and his own subsequent public statements, felt betrayed. He accused Ngotho of selling secrets.

Miano’s post offers a different narrative. She says Ngotho has, in fact, been a gentleman who kept what he knows as a matter of personal integrity, not because he lacks the material. “Gachagua has all your secrets,” she writes, directing her words at the former DP. “Some bad, others very very bad you would never want public. He has kept them as a gentleman because unlike you he is mature.”

But the most striking allegation she makes concerns what she says happened during the impeachment period.

Miano claims Gachagua hatched a plan to have Ngotho killed. She says this plot was devised at Gachagua’s private office, which she refers to as “mlima,” and that a down payment of five million shillings was handed over.

She further claims one of the hired hitmen got cold feet and alerted Ngotho, saving his life. “Was Ngotho not saved by one of the hitmen?” she asks in her post.

Kenya Insights cannot independently verify this specific allegation. However, the broad context of threats and plots during that period is not entirely without precedent.

Gachagua himself, in a letter to Inspector General of Police Douglas Kanja dated April 15, 2025, alleged that a plot to assassinate him had been authorized at the highest levels of government, claiming that 101 masked officers had been deployed to Gatanga to eliminate him and that operatives trained in biological weapons were planning to poison him through inhaled chemicals. Kanja responded by urging Gachagua to notify police in advance of his movements if he required additional security.

The Brother’s Wife and the 150 Million Question

Miano’s post does not stop at murder allegations. She accuses Gachagua of impregnating the wife of his late brother. His late brother, Nderitu Gachagua, held the Mathira parliamentary seat before Rigathi inherited the constituency in the 2017 election.

She also claims Gachagua acquired the Olivia Gardens property using a deposit of Sh150 million that she says she has documentary evidence for, and that he deliberately undervalued the property to defraud his late brother’s children of their inheritance. “Na nitaleta evidence kwa kalatas,” she writes, promising to bring paper evidence. “You thief.”

These are allegations that, if proven, would constitute criminal conduct well beyond political rivalry. Kenya Insights has not been able to independently verify the property acquisition figures Miano cites, nor the details of the alleged fraud against the late Nderitu’s estate. What is on the public record is that Rigathi Gachagua won the Mathira seat after his brother’s tenure and that the Gachagua name has carried political weight in Nyeri County for decades.

A Fight That Was Always Coming

Those who know both Miano and Gachagua say the confrontation that has now exploded publicly was always a matter of when rather than whether.

Miano has never been a shrinking figure.

Even after her firing, she found a way to remain politically visible, securing first an appointment to the Board of the Micro and Small Enterprise Authority in January 2025, then a position on the Kenya Pipeline Company Limited board in March 2025 after her MSEA posting was revoked. She clearly maintains the trust of the Ruto administration, which adds a layer of political complexity to her public assault on Gachagua.

Gachagua, meanwhile, has spent the period since his October 2024 impeachment rebranding himself as a persecuted champion of Mount Kenya, launching the Democracy for the Citizens Party and positioning himself as the primary opposition alternative to President Ruto ahead of 2027.

His announcement in September 2025 that he intends to challenge Ruto for the presidency has been accompanied by escalating confrontations with security forces at his public events and a steady stream of dramatic allegations against the current government.

Into this combustible environment, Martha Miano has tossed something considerably more dangerous than political commentary. She has posted, on a public platform, under her own name, specific allegations linking a man who wants to be Kenya’s next president to two deaths, a foiled murder plot and a family fraud.

Gachagua’s critics will say they are not surprised. His defenders will say this is a coordinated attack from those aligned with State House, designed to neutralize him before 2027. What neither side can do is make the questions disappear.

Who was the powerful and influential man Regina Wairimu wrote about in her notebook? What happened to the DNA evidence from the crime scene? Why has no one been charged two years after a young engineering student and her eight-and-a-half-month-old unborn son were buried in a single casket in a village in Nyeri? And what does Francis Ngotho Maina know?

Kenya Insights will continue to follow all lines of this investigation.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The allegations attributed to Martha Miano in this report are drawn from her public Facebook post. Kenya Insights has not been able to independently verify all specific claims contained therein. The allegations regarding Regina Wairimu’s death are drawn from a Daily Nation investigative report published February 23, 2023, and from a prior Citizen Weekly report on the case.