It is a delicate dance.

Everyone is a constitutional lawyer these days, even the charlatans parading in front of the cameras of the Kenyan media that they purport to despise. The National Assembly has lawyers sitting on it. The media fraternity (if fraternal it is) has lawyers mouthing off in front of any camera that will record their words. And all of them are constitutional lawyers with the capability of reading, comprehending and interpreting the Constitution of Kenya for the great unwashed.

The National Assembly has squared off, in recent weeks, against the media fraternity. It passed a law that has been described, by different interlocutors, as either draconian or obnoxious. The National Assembly claimed to know what the Constitution said and what it meant.

But the people, in whose name the National Assembly and the media claim to speak and act for, remains in the dark about the meaning of it all. It remains unclear to the people whether the institutions claiming to speak for them have the people's interests at heart.

The representatives of the people, the members of the National Assembly, who passed the law that the media fraternity find so objectionable attempted to explain their act as being for the benefit of the people who have suffered at the hands of a media that has failed to regulate itself for the benefit of the people.

The Constitution, bad drafting and all, is a beautiful piece of writing when one looks at it in context. It has multiple moving parts that, when read out of context, will appear incongruous, especially when laws are drafted to implement it. The Constitution establishes a system that should allow for its smooth implementation. However, its implementation will require that well-intentioned men and women do the right thing in the implementation of the Constitution. The passage of the Kenya Information and Communications Bill, 2013, that is awaiting presidential assent, is a case in point. 

The institutions involved in its drafting include the Office of the Attorney-General and Department of justice, the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, the Commission on the Implementation of the Constitution, the Communications Commission of Kenya, the National Assembly, the Media Owners Association, the Kenya Union of Journalists, the Editors' Guild of Kenya and the people of Kenya. The general consensus, a consensus that was built by the media (owners, editors and journalists), is that the National Assembly went "rogue" and inserted draconian (or obnoxious) provisions that would "muzzle the media" and "roll back the fundamental rights of the media."

Both the media and the National Assembly claim to speak for the people. Both could be right. Both could be wrong. The history of Kenya is littered with instances when both the media and the members of the National Assembly betrayed the trust bestowed on them by the people. In those instances, the people paid a steep price. The people demonstrate their displeasure or satisfaction by how many of the incumbent members of the National Assembly they re-elect and how many newspapers they buy or how many news programmes they watch (and believe).

The transition from 40 years of KANU hegemony continues in fits and starts. It has not been stopped. It has not been rolled back. But it requires a delicate dance between the people's representatives, the media and the people in order to do the right thing for the benefit of the people and the nation. When the three fail to do so, the world is treated to the spectacle of the people's representatives called "rogue", the media being accused of partisanship and the people being kept in the dark.