In the late 2023 and the better part of 2024, Francis Gaitho has been among the most vocal political activists putting the government up to task.
For instance, in the ongoing Gen-Z anti-government protests, he has been on record calling out the government for how they have handled the protests.
Gaitho, a football expert, started his political activism career on TikTok where he shared videos discussing various issues.
He later moved to X, formerly Twitter where he has also been sharing threads and videos calling out President William Ruto and his administration.
Precisely, Gaitho’s influence on X, where he commands a followership of close to 100,000 followers, has been significant especially during the recent political events in the country.
This was evident after the National Police Service (NPS), put out a statement claiming that they wanted to arrest Gaitho when they mistakenly arrested veteran journalist Macharia Gaitho.
“The National Police Service would like to clarify to the public that this morning, we arrested journalist Macharia Gaitho in a case of mistaken identity, meant for the arrest of Francis Gaitho who is our subject of investigation
“We reiterate that as a Service, we do not target journalists in any way, and today’s incident is highly regrettable,” NPS said in a statement published on their X account.
While not much is known about Gaitho, it is understood that he is a football expert, and he was among officials that prepared Kenya’s winning bid for the 2018 Africa Nations Championship (CHAN) tournament hosting rights.
Although the rights were later withdrawn by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) due to lack of quality stadiums, he delivered the bid to CAF headquarters in Cairo in 2014.
This was before Gaitho joined politics with the hope of clinching the Thika Township parliamentary seat which is currently being held by Alice Ng’ang’a.
In an interview, the activist said he wanted to use his position in parliament to reform the ailing sports sector.
“Sports and technology are some of the few sectors which can absorb jobless youths in droves, and they’re ironically the least funded and most neglected in policy formulation
“It is quite unfortunate that funds drawn from the sports and youth funds were diverted to recurrent expenditure under the watch of a parliament with so-called “youthful” MP’s,” he said.
Although a controversial figure, his popularity is steadily rising and with the current political class facing ridicule from the youth, Gaitho is expected to run for the Thika Township MP seat in 2027.