President Uhuru Kenyatta has asked those governors elected on the Jubilee ticket to quit the party and seek a fresh mandate from the people if they support the Pesa Mashinani referendum plan. One of Mr Kenyatta's eloquent apologists is a lawyer called Jasper Mbiuki who elaborates that if these governors support the calls for a referendum, they are doing so expressly against the "policies"of the Jubilee alliance and that it is politically unconscionable for them to remain in office if they disagree with a core plank of the alliance's political plans.
Both Mr Kenyatta and Mr Mbiuki, and indeed many of their allies, have taken the wrong approach against the Pesa Mashinani campaign. In the 1980s and 1990s, Kenyan schoolchildren were compelled to recite the Loyalty Pledge. Very few of us understood what it meant, but we did it anyway because, after all, children are taught to obey their teachers without question. Those days are long gone. In the Information Age it is not enough to simply declare something to be true without offering an explanation or proof that it is. A blanket declaration will simply demand that to those it is diercted find out for themselves whether the claim is true or not.
Mr Kenyatta and Mr Mbiuki declare that it is "against the wishes of the alliance" to support any calls for a referendum. They use this as justification to threaten members of the alliance who support the calls with "dire consequences". What they have failed to do is prove that the alliance is indeed against the calls for a referendum. In 2012, the National Alliance and the United Republican Party made big shows of signing up members. When they submitted their applications to the Registrar of Political Parties, they were proud of the millions of Kenyans who had signed up to the parties.
Since those halcyon days, TNA and URP have done little to nurture their party memberships. Like all other political parties, TNA and URP, the principal members of the Jubilee Alliance, have become captives of the parliamentary party and the President and his deputy. The rank-and-file remain mere cogs in the parliamentary party-president-deputy president machinery designed to order the nation in a particular way. The rank-and-file, that is, remain political cannon fodder and are expected to toe the party leaderships' line whether they agree or not.
One of the utopian hopes of the Committee of Experts was that the management of political parties would be separated from the government of the country. Mr Kenyatta and Mr Mbiuki, both members of the national Executive, have put paid to that cozy idea. Mr Kenyatta retains the official-but-fuzzy title of Party Leader even while he is the President of Kenya. Mr Mbiuki retains his office as TNA's Legal Secretary even while he serves in the Office of the Deputy President. Both attempt to recreate the morbid arrangements of the one-party days when KANU was the government and the government was KANU. Ironically, this is an ideal that is also held by Raila Odinga and Kalonzo Musyoka and their fellow believers in the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy.
Mr Kenyatta's and Mr Mbiuki's declarations that any support for the referendum by a member of the alliance is against the wishes of the party is actually a declaration that any support by a member of the alliance is against the wishes of the President. Just as any support against the Okoa Kenya referendum is against the wishes of the people of Kenya is actually a declaration that is against the wishes of Raila Odinga. In in that lies the biggest threat against constitutionalism and the institutionalisation of the political process.
This personalisation of political institutions, the creation of cults of personality if you will, is the principle reason why parliamentarians see nothing wrong with arrogantly arrogating to themselves ever larger sums out of the Consolidated Fund as if they have an absolute right to do so and to ignore the crushing burden of the economy on the backs of the people.
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