The Old Guard lives in fear that the Young Turks are out to rob of them of their cozy sinecures. When Paul Muite was appointed the chairman of the Law Society, with Willy Mutunga as his deputy, Baba Moi may not have quivered in his boots, but he was no longer at ease. The Law Society, even after some of its members came after its Council for "engaging in politics," distinguished itself for living up to its ideals, especially that of civic education on the law. In the annals of the Second Liberation, the Law Society was a Young Turk in and of itself.
That is not the case today. Thirteen years after we saw off Baba Moi's project, things have come full circle. The Uhuru Kenyatta we rejected in 2002 is now President of Kenya. The William Ruto who stood foursquare behind him in 2002 is now the Deputy President. The Law Society, just like the moribund KANU, is riven with factionalism and corruption. The abortive Annual General Meeting on Saturday, the 26th September, exposed the Law Society's dark secrets, if only for a few hours.
Perhaps it has something to do with the period of relative political peace after Mwai Kibaki was sworn in as Kenya's third President or the wave of optimism that washed over the nation after that seminal day. For some reason the Law Society stopped playing the unofficial role of the Fourth Arm of Government that it had played all through the 1990s. It no longer cared to hold the government of the day to account, maybe because so many of its members were serving on commissions, boards and committees of the government or representing the government if fee-paying briefs that proved to be quite lucrative.
Either way, the Law Society turned inwards and became just another association. It engaged in may of the behaviours that we had collectively abhorred, none as abhorrent as the campaigning for places on the Council of the Law Society. Big money spending became the norm and the Chairmen and members of the Council became just another group of politicians out to line their pockets.
If it wasn't for the International Arbitration Centre and the spectacular overreach by the Council, most members of the Law Society would have been content to make their views made only during the ho-hum AGMs. But when the Council made it an express rule that all practicing advocates must contribute to the proposed arbitration centre, even after the Council had indicated that it was securing a very large credit facility with a bank, many youthful members had had enough. Their agitation will expose more than the avarice of the members of the Council and their KANU-era thinking.
These new Young Turks may not have the gravitas that Paul Muite or Willy Mutunga brought to the game, but they are a harbinger of the less-polished things to come that nevertheless change the game. These are not lawyers prepared to let "decorum" act as a fig leaf for the profound money-grab perpetrated by the Council; they have worked hard for their fees in extremely hostile circumstances and they will not sit idly by as the Council threatens their livelihoods. If it means destroying the Law Society in order to save it, so be it. I can't say that I disagree with their tactics or their objectives.
We are frequently asked to venerate the old, the aged, because of their experience and wisdom. But the harsh reality is that these are the same people, an entire generation, that has impoverished our nation and destroyed venerable institutions, such as the Law Society. The old deserve respect and veneration when the sum total of their experience and wisdom has been for the good of the people, but the deserve neither respect nor veneration when they have been the source of unfairness and untold misery. The Law Society is getting a dose of the medicine it had given the government of Baba Moi. Like they say in California, payback is a female dog.
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