Kirinyaga County Women Representative Jane Njeri Maina has lit a political firestorm inside the Democracy for the Citizens Party (DCP), publicly accusing the party’s own Deputy Leader, former Kakamega Senator Cleophas Malala, of operating as a covert agent for President William Ruto’s government while posing as a committed opposition figure.
The accusations, delivered in an incendiary post on her X account on Wednesday, have rocked a party already battered by defections and whispers of infiltration, and have thrust into the open what many DCP insiders had long suspected in private.
Maina, a close Gachagua loyalist who has stood with the former Deputy President since his turbulent impeachment in October 2024, alleged that Malala convened a secret night gathering of Kirinyaga Members of County Assembly allied to Governor Anne Waiguru, doing so between 8 pm and 10 pm on Tuesday evening at the Golden Palm hotel in Kenol, Murang’a County.
The meeting’s stated purpose, she claimed, was to recruit and organise a rival internal bloc designed to undercut Gachagua’s grassroots foot soldiers in Kirinyaga ahead of the 2027 general elections.
Most damaging was her claim about the money.
Maina alleged that Malala disbursed Ksh 20,000 to each MCA who attended, funds she said were furnished by forces intent on fracturing DCP from within.
She accused those financiers of seeking to derail what she called the “united alternative government,” a reference to the opposition coalition that Gachagua has been painstakingly constructing with Kalonzo Musyoka’s Wiper party since his removal from office.
Addressing Malala directly in language that was withering in its contempt, Maina wrote: “I do not know who you work for, nor do I want to speculate.” She reminded him of what she described as a pattern of soliciting funds from multiple political actors in exchange for favours, a practice she said he had developed while serving as UDA’s Secretary General.
“Unfortunately, it seems that you have not changed one bit,” she wrote, before issuing what amounted to a declaration of open war. “So bring it on, you shall face off with me where the rubber meets the road. In case you forgot, where I come from, we milk lions while seated on porcupines.”
The charges, even by the scorched-earth standards of Kenyan intraparty politics, carry particular weight because of the broader context in which they land. For months, Gachagua himself had been warning that Ruto’s camp had planted moles inside DCP, publicly vowing in January to eject them one by one.
“Within my team, we knew who the Ruto spies were. DCP is intact, no one is leaving,” Gachagua said at the time. He stopped short of naming Malala. On Wednesday, Maina appeared to remove any remaining ambiguity.
Malala’s trajectory inside DCP has been shadowed by suspicion almost from the start. He joined the party as Interim Deputy Leader when Gachagua unveiled DCP in Lavington in May 2025, brought in as a bridge figure whose Western Kenya profile and national name recognition could help the party escape the charge that it was purely a Mount Kenya tribal vehicle.
The two men had been bonded by a shared experience of political ejection: Malala had been ousted from UDA’s Secretary General position after he opposed Gachagua’s impeachment, and the former DP welcomed him into DCP with considerable fanfare.
But the questions began piling up. Malala missed the party’s three-day strategy retreat in Mombasa in January, his absence drawing sharp comment from delegates who found an empty chair where he should have been sitting.
He had also been conspicuously absent from a string of DCP public rallies over the preceding weeks. When political analysts began speculating openly about a possible defection back to UDA, Gachagua gave him cover, citing illness sustained after the annual Malala Super Cup football tournament in Kakamega.
“He was in Kakamega for the Super Cup, after which he fell seriously ill and asked me for permission to rest,” Gachagua told a radio interviewer in January, insisting the party was intact.
Maina’s allegations on Wednesday suggest the explanation has worn thin. Her post also hinted at prior private confrontations between herself and Malala, describing his alleged nocturnal meeting in Kenol as the moment he had “crossed the Rubicon.” The phrase signals a break that, in her view, can no longer be managed behind closed doors.
The Waiguru dimension of the affair adds a charged subplot.
The Kirinyaga Governor, who has publicly and repeatedly rejected overtures to join DCP, declared in December 2025 that, as she put it, “kwa Wamunyoro siendi,” signalling she would not align with Gachagua’s camp.
She has maintained her positioning within Ruto’s orbit, and the former DP has in turn accused most of Kirinyaga’s MCAs of having been “pocketed” by the county government, predicting they would be voted out for betraying the community.
Waiguru dismissed those accusations as misleading, and had not responded to Maina’s latest allegations by the time of publication.
Malala had not issued any public denial on his social media platforms as of Wednesday evening, though associates quoted by political commentators suggested he had privately warned Maina to prepare for a bruising nominations battle in 2027, an implicit threat that their disagreement would follow them all the way to the ballot.
Malala’s history in Kirinyaga is not without its own ironies. It was he who chaired the Senate committee that in 2020 cleared Waiguru of an impeachment motion brought against her by the county assembly, a piece of political history that his critics within DCP now invoke to argue that his loyalties were never truly with Gachagua’s camp.
For DCP, which will spend most of 2026 attempting to expand beyond its Central Kenya stronghold and prove it can deliver results in the 2027 cycle, the timing of this eruption could not be worse.
The party already absorbed the blow of Juja MP George Koimburi’s defection in late 2025. Nyeri Governor Mutahi Kahiga has signalled a drift back toward the Ruto administration. Nakuru grassroots officials threatened to bolt in January.
Against that backdrop, a public allegation by one of the party’s most visible elected legislators that its own second-in-command is a State House plant threatens to inflict damage that no amount of denial can easily repair.
Gachagua’s office had not released any comment by the time this story went to press. Whether he will move against Malala, shield him once more, or simply allow the accusation to smoulder in the public domain may be the defining political test of his leadership as the opposition road to 2027 grows steeper and more treacherous with every passing week.
