Harebrained schemes of folly.

If the Judicial Service Commission had not over-extended itself in the first place over the dismissal of the Chief Registrar of the Judiciary, and if the National Assembly hadn't bitten off more than it could chew, intellectually and Constitutionally, and if the President was not under siege from all corners, perhaps then there wouldn't have been a petition alleging malfeasance among members of the Commission, the National Assembly wouldn't have been the dog to the President's tail being vigorously wagged, and we wouldn't have Dunga, J., making one ruling, the President pretending it did not exist, and the Law Society twisting itself into a pretzel attempting to find a role to play in the whole sordid affair.

The dismissal of the CRJ revealed more than the Judiciary or the Commission wished. It is not clear that regardless of the lofty words of the Chief Justice, both as the head of the Judiciary and the Chairman of the Commission, all is not well in the Judiciary. Allusions to "corruption fighting back" by the CJ belie the smoothness with which the members of the Judiciary, collectively, and the members of the Commission, collectively, have lined their pockets as if Kenya had a bottomless pit of financial lucre. Indeed, it is not unfair to compare the obsessive attraction to financial avarice of the the Judiciary and the Commission with that of the much-reviled members of the eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh Parliaments, the cake, of course, being taken by the eleventh.

The President has not covered himself in glory either. The choice of Aaron Ringera as the chairman of a tribunal to investigate the accused members of the Commission was bad enough, given Kenyans' history with the man when he oversaw the fiasco that was the 2003 "radical surgery" of the Judiciary and his tenure as the Director of the Kenya Anti-corruption Commission that failed to find skeletons in the Triton and Anglo-leasing closets. But to appoint his lawyer, the same one who defended his right to stand for the election despite being accused of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, was testing the patience of Kenyans too far. None has a kind thing to say about the President's choice of members of the tribunal. None will.

But it is the National Assembly that deserves special animus. For a large body with a large number of professionals and intellectuals, one would expect that the theory of large numbers would apply. One would expect that for the past nine months of gaffes and missteps, the National Assembly was owed at least one well-though, well-executed incident. sadly, even with that especially low bar, the National Assembly has revealed its utter nakedness to the people. It has proven that it is incapable of serious interrogation of current events that affect our lives or the business of government. Other than a single-minded pursuit of harebrained self-aggrandizing schemes, it has only perfected the art of doing two things: sticking its feet in the ICC Affair, and picking a fight with either the Judiciary or the Senate. The National assembly has become more of menace to governance than even the largely irrelevant Senate. The two years that we must wait after a general election so that we can recall a parliamentarian meet the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Under the leadership of the Speaker and the Leader of Majority, the National Assembly has done everything in its power to muddy the waters in L'Affaire Shollei and its aftermath. Now, rather than admit that they do not know how to read the Constitution, and that many of them do not understand the concept of "separation of powers", they have decided to drag the President into a fight he did not want at a time he was not ready with an enemy he cannot defeat. The pigheadedness of the National assembly in debating a report after they have been ordered by the courts not to do so will engender a constitutional crisis that cannot be resolved in the courts of law, but in the alleyways of politics. If this is how the National Assembly intends to participate in the governance of Kenya, then it is time for us to re-evaluate the importance of that particular chamber.