CoG chair Ahmed Abdullahi decries impeachment motions against governors
By Arnold Ngure, September 3, 2025Council of Governors Chairperson and Wajir County Governor Ahmed Abdullahi has decried the rampant impeachment motions against governors.
Speaking during an interview on Tuesday, September 2, 2025, Abdullahi indicated that the reason county chiefs are threatened is that their offices lack political protection.
“The office of the governor does not have a lot of protection because of the disconnect between the political party system and the governors. Political parties believe that members of parliament are more useful because they pass bills for them,” Abdullahi said.
Lack of political protection
“That is why you will find a governor who is being impeached by a majority party to which he belongs, yet the party does not intervene.”
“Impeachments should be a safety valve when things don’t work; it shouldn’t be the first arsenal that you throw at someone,” Abdullahi said.
He equally remarked that governors are mostly targeted by independent institutions like the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) and other investigative bodies, yet counties only receive a small percentage of the national government budget.
“There is so much focus on the counties, and I think this is the problem that we have with the independent offices and commissions. They think that they have been set up to just oversight county governments,” Abdullahi stated.
Failed cases
He observed that while many of the cases lodged against governors fail, they suffer reputational damage from the weeks and months of bad publicity.
“So many governors have been taken to court, but a lot of the time, the court throws out those cases. They are rushed, and some of them are very flimsy,” Abdullahi stated.
“We don’t even have a threshold for abuse of office, gross misconduct, and violating the Constitution? Even lawyers don’t agree whether impeachment is a legal or political process,” he said.
He added that most of the impeachment motions are a result of political struggles in the counties and not based on impeachable misconduct.
“A lot of these impeachments have got to do with the toxic politics in our counties; there are factional struggles, succession plan issues, and it is not always about mismanagement,” Abdullahi stated.