Starting to cope with Baba's absence

Even Mr. Rigathi Gachagua has the good sense to pretend that he loved Raila Odinga unreservedly. The late Mr. Odinga was a force of nature, a political phenom. He shaped and reshaped Kenyan politics. He became an institution. It didn't matter what power presidents thought they had, if Raila Odinga adopted a position on any matter, the president had to figure out how much political pain he was willing to endure to try and prove Raila Odinga wrong. More often than not, the president chose peace.

So it is no surprise that men and women of little political consequence are today pretending to have been Mr. Odinga's closest boon friends, that they stood with him even when he was tilting at windmills, that they were the wind beneath his sails, and that they espoused the same [often radical] politics he espoused. In the days after his state funeral, you have seen these political dwarfs lining up at Mr. Odinga's grave, laying wreaths, and paining themselves as the spiritual; successors of Mr. Odinga's politics. It is a wonder Mama Ida Odinga has not chased them from her who with a kiboko.

We are still coming to terms with Mr. Odinga's death. We should have been better prepared; even international icons die. Mr. Odinga was quite aged, and it was unreasonable to expect that the would outlive us all. And because we were not prepared, we are trying, in our own way, to shape the post-Raila-Odinga era, with charlatans and scallawags taking on airs and pretending to being the Second Coming of Raila Odinga, while others try, in underhanded and scurrilous ways, to erase from the historical record the vile and hateful things that said about, and did to, Raila Odinga.

I don't know who among the contenders will inherit Mr. Odinga's political kingdom. But in the 22 months to the next general election, Mr. Odinga's shadow is going to loom quite large. In his political party, the Orange Democratic Movement, no amount of PR engineering is going to Make Mr. Oburu Odinga, Mr. Odinga's elder brother, a charismatic leader. Neither will it make Ms. Gladys Wanga, Homa Bay Governor, any more popular now as she was when Mr. Odinga anointed her as the Homa Bay gubernatorial candidate. The true battle for the leadership mantle in ODM is surely going to be between Mr. Edwin Sifuna, Secretary general and Senator of Nairobi, and Babu Owino, Member for Embakasi East, isn't it? No one knows.

Kenya's political opposition is practically dead. The Minority Party exists in name only. It does not have a unifying figure to direct its energies. Ms. Martha Karua, indefatigable as she might be, is in the same leaky dinghy as Mr. Gachagua and Mr. Kalonzo Musyoka. No one is listening to her, just as no one is listening to the other two has-beens. Peter Anyang' Nyong'o and James Orengo, the late Mr. Odinga's closet political confidants are over the hill same as Mr. Oburu Odinga; they will not be building a political movement on the memory of the late Mr. Odinga any time soon. Their political glory days are long in the past.

The ODM appointees in the Cabinet will keep their mouths shut; no one with any sense talks with their mouth full. The ODM parliamentary party is going to maintain a studious silence as well. Even there champion debaters will say little worthy of attention. They are all trying to work out if they have a political future now that the political memory of the man who brought them to political prominence is swiftly being co-opted by charlatans and scallawags.

The political moment is in President Ruto's hands to shape or shatter. Only one man has the political charisma to affect how his presidency will evolve in the next 22 months: Uhuru Kenyatta. But will Mr. Kenyatta lose interest? Will he demonstrate the late Mr. Odinga's deft political touch? Or will he foolishly and obstinately insist on the deeply unpopular and unliked Mr. Fred Matiang'i as the vessel of his politics?

The King is dead; Long Live The King.

Junet Mohamed, in his eulogy for the late Second (and Longest-Serving) Prime Minister of Kenya, the Right Honourable Raila Amolo Odinga, Elder of the Order of the Golden Heart, took to heart the allusion to Raila Odinga's "Orphans". He noted that there were so many of them, he would organise them into a group and become their chairman. Amidst the humour is a nugget of truth: Prime Minister Odinga was a force of nature who touched millions of hearts and changed millions of lives.

We will have all the time in the world to parse together the life and times of Prime Minister Odinga. For now, we must contend with the void that his death leaves in the politics of Kenya. Prime Minister Odinga has been a consequential politician since the day he was accused of participating, and sponsoring, the 1982 attempted coup d'état against Daniel Toroitich arap Moi.

Those of us who came of age in the 1990s only came to know of him when he was released from detention in 1991 and the pivotal role he played, first at his father's side, and later as an Opposition politician in his own right, in the Second Liberation of Kenya. Few will deny him his flowers; Prime Minister Odinga was a key figure in the reintroduction of Multi-party Politics in Kenya, the constitutional reform movement that resulted in the abortive 2005 constitutional referendum and the successful 2010 constitutional referendum.

Prime Minister Odinga built a formidable political identity, one that has seen dozens of national politicians gain fame, wealth and power. There isn't a politician sitting in the Parliament of Kenya today whose fortunes were not shaped by Prime Minister Odinga. The same is true of county governors, past and present, and dozens upon dozens of local politicians. One either made their name by vehemently and vociferously railing against Prime Minister Odinga or by riding in his coattails to the seats of political power.

Presidents bent to the inevitable: in order to govern, and govern effectively, they needed Prime Minister Odinga, if not on their side, but not in opposition. The Raila Odinga Handshake was the most reliable political insurance policy a president could have. Moi, Kibaki, Kenyatta the Younger and Dr. Ruto - all of them came to the same inevitable conclusion and their governments enjoyed a stability no other politician, themselves included, could provide.

Now that we have buried Prime Minister Odinga, we are in uncharted waters. Mr. Kalonzo Musyoka, one of the senior-most politicians who transcended the same political period as Prime Minister Odinga lacks that charisma and political sure-footedness that Prime Minister Odinga displayed. Ms. Martha Karua, one of Prime Minister Odinga's lawyers when he was persecuted by Mr. Moi, has the political spine, but not the common touch that endeared Prime Minister Odinga to millions. No one else has even the lickspittle of a chance to become the force of nature that Prime Minister Odinga was. We are in uncharted waters. Will Prime Minister Odinga's "Orphans" find among them a champion to carry forward Raila Amolo Odinga's dreams for Kenya?

What Mr. Imanyara must teach us

Gitobu Imanyara was on the frontlines of the Second Liberation, one of the few principled political streetfighters that Kenya actually deserved. Then he got elected to the National Assembly and it all turned to shit. He is not the first political radical to have forgotten the lessons of revolution, the most important being that while a revolution needs men and women to lead from the front, the revolution needs an institutional movement to make the gains of the revolution permanent.

In the Sunday Standard of the 5th October, 2025, Mr. Imanyara says what has become common knowledge: seven [honest] men will save Kenya. This is disappointing.

There are many men and women who have made sacrifices in the name of Kenya and for Kenyans. They have offered not just their bodies, but their intellect and influence to shape the politics of the country. For the most part, they have achieved many big and small gains. But they have singularly failed to alter the trajectory Kenya has been on since Independence. Kenya has entrenched a form of corrupt ethnic balkanisation that has all but guaranteed that the trajectory of the human development index is downwards.

There was a period, sometime in the 1980s and ending with the 1992 multiparty general election, when the Kenyan political revolution was truly organised. It not only established a broad cohort of men and women who would lead the revolution, it also generated a wealth of political discourse that shaped what would become the first draft of Harmonised Draft Constitution of 2010. The Mwakenya writing, the columnists who wrote for Society and Finance, the "opposition" lawyers who defended political prisoners, the Mothers of Political Prisoners who protested for months at Freedom Corner, the Green Belt Movement that challenged the anti-human environmental policies of the Moi government...the list is long...most of their work has been undermined, watered down, distorted and, in some cases, reversed in the decades since the 1992 general election.

Instead, we have been programmed to believe that what Kenya needs is a saviour, or a group of saviours, who will right the ship of state. We no longer speak of organising or institutionalising the revolution. We place enormous faith, and pressure, on individuals to reform the country without building the necessary infrastructure that will assure success. Political parties, newspaper and news magazine columnists, playwrights and filmmakers, musicians and novelists, public debates and intellectual tradition, everything that we need to institutionalise and organise the revolution is a for-profit arrangement that prioritises extremely short-term gains at the expense of the long-term development of the country.

It is why people are suddenly excited that Mr. Maraga has appointed the United Green Movement Party as his political party briefcase of choice to bring him to the highest seat of political power in Kenya. And why people haven't taken time to ask why a political party that seemed to have sprung to life in 2019 with a slate of registered members from all counties in Kenya did so without running a single recruitment exercise in the months before its establishment and registration. Who are these mysterious Kenyans who had not only heard of and agreed with the political message of the United Green Movement Party, but chose to register with the political party, hand over some of there personal information, and agreed to be entered as founder-members of the political party when it was registered by the Registrar of Political Parties?

Even the few saviours we have elected to Parliament don't seem to know how to understand how the government actually functions. They have ideas. Some of their ideas are great ones. But they seem confused about their role in the government. Indeed, many of them refuse to accept that they are in the government. Take Mr. Omtatah's obsession with public finance. As a senator, he has the power to summon the Cabinet Secretaries responsible for public money to appear before the Senate and account for how they have spent the public money entrusted to them. Mr. Omtatah has not done so even once.

He also has the power to introduce in the Senate legislative proposals (Bills) that would reform the public finance management framework. He has done so only once and the proposal itself was a miss-mash of confused musings about public debt and the public debt management office. Needless to say, beyond publishing the Bill Mr. Omtatah did little to promote it among his Senate colleagues, and ignored the vital role of the National Assembly in seeing to it that it was enacted by Parliament. Instead, Mr. Omtatah has not missed an opportunity to sue the sue government he's serves in whenever it has enacted a Finance Bill. His litigation victories since he became a parliamentarian have been on very narrow points of the law, and have done little to reform the government he serves in.

The point I am trying to make is that Mr. Imanyara's prescription for what ails Kenya is what we have practiced since 1992 without success. If he were to pay attention, even he would admit that the promulgation of a new constitution in 2010 did little to change the way Kenyan political institutions behaved; it just slapped a veneer of legitimacy on them. But, by and large, the corrupt ethnic balkanisation that prevailed in the 1990s continues to poison the body politic in 2025. Given his vast experience in the radical political opposition in the 1980s, what Mr. Imanyara should be helping us to do is to rethink everything we know about political organisation and institutionalisation of the not-yet-over revolution. We need to rebuild, from the ground up, political institutions, political ideologies, political thinking, and political streetfighting. Wow must eschew the narrative that we need Messiahs. No one is going to save us. Only we, the body of Kenyans, collectively, can save ourselves.

The definition of "insanity"

Now that we are all committed to campaigning for the various elective posts in the national government at the 2027 general election, regardless of the fact that we have not implemented many of the promises we made to each other during the 2022 general election, it is time to revise some of my hobbyhorses. One of my obsessions is whether the system we are participating in right now is capable of identifying, promoting, nominating and electing qualified politicians to successfully stand in the general election and effective perform the functions of the State offices to which they are elected. My view, as always, is a mixed one, but the short answer is, "No."

Kenya inherited the Westminster style of politics from the English and, through several constitutional amendments and statutory tweaks, adapted it to the peculiar style that Jomo Kenyatta and the Kiambu Mafia promoted before and after Independence: the Balkanisation of Kenya into tribal fiefdoms with tribal satraps pledging the troth of their tribes to the president, and not to their own tribal interest. In return, the president would appoint the tribal satraps to high public office, usually the Cabinet but also assistant minister, chairman of the board of a parastatal, ambassador or diplomat of some kind, head of a powerful government organisation like the Kenya Police Force, and so on and so forth.

For nigh on forty years a majority of Kenyans believed that if their tribal satrap was "in government", they too, were "in government" and the fabulous wealthy their tribal satrap acquired during his tenure "in the government" was a reflection of the tribe's power and influence "in the government". Obviously, any casual observation of the country the past fifty years shows that this is not true. Urban areas, for their most part, benefited immensely from the "development budget". The rest of the country would get piecemeal "development" as and when the president deemed it necessary to secure a political goal. It had nothing to do with the power of their satrap or the needs of the people that a road or a school or a factory or a dam or a hospital or a university was built in their "area". All that mattered was that the president would get something out of it in the end.

This lesson appears not to have been learnt.

Chief Justice (Emeritus) Maraga has thrown his hat in the presidential election ring. For this, he has chosen the United Green Movement Party as his vehicle to State House. He has promised to "popularise and strengthen the party". It is sad that a man in his mid-seventies, who has been witnessed to epochal political transformations in this country, is continuing in the legacy of buying briefcases and thinking that he is the new broom that will sweep the Augean stables clean. When he fails - and he will fail - he will not have the necessary political education to understand why he failed.

There are no shortcuts to organising a people. It takes time, effort, money, charisma and, sometimes, violence, to get them to see that their fate can only be salvaged if they row int he same boat and in the same direction. The Hon. Mr. Maraga's political party of choice has been in existence only since 2019. In that time, it has done little, if anything at all, to "popularise and strengthen" itself. It has not established a system for subscription-based membership. It has obsessed itself with he "national leadership" and has done little, if anything, to establish grassroots leadership cadres and the village and ward levels. In my opinion, it is not a serious party regardless of its lofty ambitions.

The same is true of all the other political parties. Not one of them is a member-driven subscription-based political party. None of them prioritises the establishment, promotion, support and development of grassroots leadership cadres at villages or ward level. What is worse is that their total focus, to the exclusion of everything else, is the presidential election; all the other elections are of interest only to the candidates yet, in the balance, a member of a county assembly has the ability to improve your quality of life that is on an order of magnitude greater than what the president or county governor can do.

It is irrelevant that counties are organised, largely, on the basis of linguistic and ethnic identities; all of them suffer from the same dearth of political education, political leadership and political knowledge. If this doesn't change, then we will be repeating the same failed pattern of behaviour we have practiced since 1964 when Jomo Kenyatta pushed through the first constitutional amendment and the result will be the same failures we have endured since Independence.

Constitutional lawyers are a menace

Lawyers are a fascinating lot and none is as fascinating as that species of lawyer known as "constitutional lawyers'. These people have such an inflated sense of themselves that they frequently forget that in Kenya, they are the equivalent of rats and lowlifes. Last week one of them pontificated on the reasons for why Kenya's elections are expensive and I swear, he it did not seem like he had given the matter more than a cursory thought.

This is my two-shillings worth of the thing: Kenyan elections are expensive because Kenyan politicians, public officers, parliamentarians, civil society and lawyers willed it to be so. Let me explain.

Unlike in the case of more sensible jurisdictions, Kenyans have built for themselves an electoral edifice that prioritises public corruption over and above all else. The entire purpose of seeking elected office in kenya is to get a chance to stick all ten fingers and ten toes in the public purse; after all, almost every major public tender has a parliamentarian, county elected representative, senior public officers and members of the Black bar as the primary beneficiaries, not the people of Kenya.

Even the election itself is an opportunity for these people to eat. After all, someone has to supply electoral materials, professional services like accountancy and legal services, security, transport, accommodation, food and beverages, and dozens of other supplies to not just the electoral commission, but to every single public entity involved in the election, including the police and intelligence services. The prices of these supplies will be inflated ten-fold, delivered late, if at all, comprising things of such poor quality that of what is delivered, wholly one-half will be discarded. And the thing of it is that no one, not the Auditor-General or the Public Accounts Committee, will enquire to closely at what was delivered, how much it cost, and who ate.

Lawyers, especially, have fomented such a poisonous air of suspicion that to is no longer tenable for basic education teachers and assistant chiefs to be appointed as polling station clerks and returning officers. Lawyers will point at the fiasco that was the 1988 Mlolongo KANU election as proof of their reasoning and leave it at that as if Kenya is still a single-party dictatorship. Instead, every five years, we engage in a very expensive exercise of securing the services of at least 58,000 polling station clerks and returning officers to supervise the general election, all of them drawing allowances, and supplied with airtime, data bundles, communications devices, transport, food, drink and other amenities at eye-watering prices. That, and the fact that we seem to procure an electric voter registration software worth tens of billions of shillings for each and every general election, is the main reason "elections are expensive" in Kenya.

Kenya has entirely too many constitutional lawyers who do little to make Kenya's constitutional experiment function effectively. Our constitutionalism has been sacrificed at the alter of the planet-sized egos of our constitutional lawyers, and expensive general elections are the clearest sign that we need a different way of thinking about constitutional affairs. We can no longer afford to be held hostage to the reckless musings of constitutional lawyers. The cost, in fiscal terms alone, is too high.

Good and evil in Palestine

I don't think there is a Palestinian in Palestine who thinks that the revolt by Hamas fighters on October 7 was wrong. I believe that most, if not all Palestinians, in Palestine on that date believed it to be a righteous response to the decades of oppression by Israeli settlers and the regular pogroms, massacres, killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, sexual violence, maimings, starvations, famines, detentions without trial and race-based discrimination by the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine and Israel.

Kenyans who have adopted the ethno-supremacist Zionist talking points propagated on the right-wing parts of the internet and the US commentariat, are under the impression that the violence by Hamas fighters constitutes terrorism and the violence by the Israeli occupation forces constitutes self-defence. Few of those Kenyans have a complete education on what constitutes settler colonialism, why it is morally and intrinsically wrong, and why occupied peoples have the moral and legal right to resist, revolt, fight back and use all tools at their disposal, including extreme violence, to end the occupation.

The Kenyans who condemn the violence by Hamas fighters frequently repost images of the Jewish holocaust and the expression "never again" as justification for the violence by the Israeli occupation forces and frequently equate the violence by Hamas fighters with Nazism. They are unwilling to accept that the new Hamas Charter, adopted in 2017, eschews the "destruction of Israel as a Jewish state" because it would shatter their self-delusion that posits that "Israelis are the victims". These Kenyans also wish to manipulate the rest of us into accepting the genocide perpetrated against the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation forces as the just outcome of the promise that was made to the biblical Israelites about the land occupied by both peoples.

It never occurs to these Kenyans that it is not possible to blame an occupied people for resisting their occupation, especially when the occupation uses the most heinous methods known to man. I never paid attention to the use of "dual use goods" before; I thought it only applied to military goods. So imagine the utter shock when Israel imposed an embargo on most food items - including chocolate and all forms of candy - from being imported into the Gaza Strip or the West Bank on account that they are "dual use goods". 

Israeli Jews, Jewish Israeli settlers and the Israeli occupation forces have engaged in a sustained campaign of mass starvation for decades (in addition to the violence, including the deliberate targeting of children as young as 10 days old) in order to create the conditions that would lead to the mass exodus of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and pave way for the total and final occupation of that territory by Israeli Jews. When Kenyans who support the Israeli occupation claim that Palestinians routinely engage in the beheading of infants and children, they invert the victim with the offender because the past two years alone have demonstrated the depravity that the Israeli Jews can sink to as they torment and oppress Palestinians, including beheadings of Palestinian infants, that Israelis have not apologised for.

These kinds of Kenyans are impossible to reason with, even as many of them are otherwise well-educated and well-traveled and know, or should know, good from evil. In 2025, in Palestine, Israel is evil. Palestine is good. It's that simple.

Rethink the proposal for terror to address boda bodas

I am wholly prepared to concede that the boda boda menace has completely gone out of control. Today's fatal accident between a Citi Shuttle and a boda boda that resulted in the death of the boda boda rider and the subsequent attack by his compatriots that resulted in the bus being set on fire harkens back to the early days of the Mwai Kibaki presidency when his Minister of Transport, the authoritarian John Michuki, attempted to rein in the out-of-control matatu industry.

We all remember how the matatu industry came to be so dominant. The fateful decision by Mzee Jomo Kenyatta to accommodate the demands of "investors" in the matatu sector, while simultaneously undermining the urban public transport jointly operated by City Hall and Kenya Bus Service at the time, would eventually end up with the organised criminal enterprise known as Mungiki becoming a law unto itself. Mr. Michuki, both as Minister of Transport and Minister of Internal Security, waged a violent and relentless war to rein in the Mungiki and the matatu sector.

When his war started, it was waged entirely through enforcement of the existing regulatory framework enacted by the central government (Traffic Act) and City Hall (Nairobi City by-laws). The decisions made by Mr. Michuki regarding road safety led to the imposition of new traffic rules on speed governors, night driving for PSVs and seatbelt use by PSV passengers. They were not enough; the road fatalities continued to climb. The Mungiki had morphed into an army and it took great extrajudicial violence to rein them in: Mr. Michuki oversaw a bloody campaign of abductions and extrajudicial killings that finally broke the Mungiki's back.

The war on the Mungiki had terrible knock-on effects. Police forces, especially the dreaded CID, were later on to be unleashed on "terrorists" and "terrorist sympathisers". It will never be known how many innocent Kenyans fell victim to the violence on Mr. Michuki's orders; what is known is that the framework of abductions and murders became entrenched. The allegations against the police forces arising out of the June 2024 and June 2025 public protests hammer home this view.

In the 2025 protests, "goons" were deployed by elected representatives to counter-protest the so-called Gen Z protestors. Many of the "goons" were ferried to protests by boda bodas, and many of the "goons" were, in fact, boda bodas. This was a culmination of a decade of lax regulation of the sector. From as early as 2012, it was clear that without a coherent road safety policy for boda bodas, they would become ungovernable. Half-hearted efforts to control them always came a cropper, whether it was confining them to designated parking spaces in Town or the wearing and use of safety equipment.

What is certain is that the transformation of what we know as public transport has not been followed by a rethinking of existing road transport policies. The design of roads remains rooted in a desire to move large numbers of passenger motor vehicles from one place to another. Other road users - including mkokoteni pullers, boda bodas, traditional taxicabs, digital taxicabs, licensed and unlicensed matatus and traditional buses - are afterthoughts, if they are thought of at all. Their needs are only addressed long after the needs of passenger motor vehicle road users have been addressed and even in this arrangement, there is a hierarchy of motor vehicle roads users. At the top are Government officials in their massive Toyota Land Cruiser Prados and chase cars; at the bottom are the owners of sub-1000cc ex-Japan shitboxes.

The chaos fomented by boda bodas is part of a larger dysfunction in road transport policy. Chasing the boda bodas from public roads will not solve the other parts of the dysfunction. A holistic approach is called for. One area of focus that would improve the situation is the rehabilitation and upgrading of non-motorised transport infrastructure, particularly footpaths and on-street business (otherwise incorrectly called "hawkers"). What public investment that has been set aside for new roads should be dedicated to rehabilitating non-motorised infrastructure to ensure that pedestrians, on-street vendors and non-motorised transportation like mkokoteni are effectively incorporated in the infrastructure. In my opinion, this would eliminate half of the congestion on public roads, with pedestrians and the vendors who serve them being confined exclusively to the pavement, and out of harms way.

Secondly, more off-street parking should be prioritised, and new PSV termini for off-peak parking developed to accommodate the massive number of PSVs that spend half the workday parked on the street, taking up valuable public road space that could otherwise be used to move motor vehicles within the CBD. This should be done concurrently with an upward revision of on-street parking fees. The current parking fee is the CBD and its immediate environs is too low which has the effect of making it ineffective in regulating availability of on-street parking. The proposal to introduce a motor vehicle tax from the 2024 was intended, in part, to solve this problem but in typical ham-fisted, deaf-eared serikali fashion, it was not introduced honestly and was shot down together with that accursed tax law in which it was contained.

Mr. Michuki's draconian tactics to subvert the Mungiki's hold on public transport ended up creating a monster that continues to consume us, more than twenty years after the destruction of Mungiki. Messrs. Chirchir (Roads and Transport) and Murkomen (Interior and National Administration) need a different approach, one that has the highest chance of transforming road transport into a safe and efficient system, and one that does not need coercive force to work. It would also have the added incentive of creating new public procurement opportunities that will create jobs at every level, which is something this Government is determined to address. But proposals to employ tiger same draconian measures beloved of the late Mr. Michuki will not only not work, but will guarantee that the Government is reviled going into the next general election.

Kizuri chajiuza

Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi did not sing his own praises. For that, he had an entire choir composed of stalwarts like Sharif Nassir, JJ Kamotho, Ezekiel Barng'etuny, William Ole Ntimama and the Muungano Choir. Longevity in Kenyan electoral politics - he was first nominated to the legislative Council in 1952 - had turned him into a household name and not even the Kihika Kimanis of the 1970s could deny that Mr. Moi's place in the firmament of Kenyan politics was well-established, if not rock solid.

Mr. Moi's successors were never that lucky. Though, of the three of the them, Mwai Kibaki was the longest in politics, he did not have the political presence that Mr. Moi had, relying instead on his place as the longest leader of the Official Opposition and his ability to unite disparate Opposition leaders into a workable coalition. Mr. Kenyatta, and his successor, unfortunately had neither Mr. Moi's legitimacy nor Mr. Kibaki's broad acceptability, instead being welded to each other with the accusations by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity stemming form the post-election violence of 2007/2008.

What they brought to presidential politics is a PR machine that was unrivalled; Mr. Raila Odinga's Coalition for Reforms and democracy was saddled by old men with very old ideas intended to prosecute old school politics in the twenty-first century. CORD was defeated, but only barely, because despite the PR razzmatazz, the vast majority of the voting public were impressed by neither coalition. Unlike Jomo Kenyatta who was intimately connected to Kenya's independent, the least not by how he and the other members of the Kapenguria Six were jailed by the colonial government, the presidential candidate and his running mate in Jubilee had nothing to point to as their place ion Kenya's political narrative and so they could only sell PR and very little more.

It must frustrate mightily that few people have strong enough feelings to voluntarily sing ones praises, despite ones highly developed sense of worth and importance. You inherit a national government whose coffers are running empty, saddled by foreign debts that threaten to overwhelm, and with dedication and determination, one has found a workable formula to keep the economic wheels turning. And yet, the men and women who should, MUST, acknowledge you political genius continue to pay attention to other less-important things like extra judicial killings, rampant corruption, tens of thousands of kilometres of potholed roads, uneven healthcare services and similar wasteful pursuits. You wonder, "What is wrong with these people?"

So, you make the fateful decision to sing your own praises. The expression, "kizuri chajiuza, kibaya chajitembeza" does not feature in your formidable repertoire of popular phrases. An extensive period of PR driven political manoeuvring is hurtling to its denouement, and the best one can do is say, "I am the best!" None can predict time; so it remains to be seen what good vainglory will bring.

Prof. Mutua's anti-boda boda crusade is misplaced

I see boda boda becoming an existential threat to the republic. - It's time to get rid of boda boda (Prof. Makau Mutua, Sunday Nation, 27th July, 2025)

Many boda boda riders are reckless and dangerous. Many boda boda riders, including their passengers riding pillion, have been involved in serious accidents, many fatal. It has gotten so bad that public hospitals have entire wards dedicated to victims of road traffic accidents involving boda boda. In Nairobi City, boda boda are driven dangerously and recklessly, almost always in complete disregard for the High Code, and have become major contributors to the chaos on public roads, leading to traffic gridlock, and wastage of hundreds of man hours everyday.

Many who patronise boda boda transport services do so because all the other options are either too slow, too expensive, or too inefficient. For example, when it comes to courier services in the City, boda boda riders are a cut above the rest, including global behemoths like Deutsche Post and EMS Speedpost. They are fast, reliable and efficient and, barring the teething problems of the early years of operation, they are also the trusted couriers for food delivery in the City. A vast swathe of Nairobi residents have a boda boda guy on speed dial.

Prof. Mutua, though, is offended by their existence, and he has marshalled his considerable intellect to deconstruct the many ways that boda boda pose a national security threat to the republic. In the late Mr. Shakespeare's words, the lady doth protest too much, methinks (Hamlet - Act III, scene II).

He alleges, without proof, that boda boda will soon become something akin to a militia with warlords to be commanded by the thuggish Kenyan political classes, and so it is in the national interest to not just control boda boda, but we must be rid of them. Maybe he is right, but absent of any credible proof of not just the inherent, unique, criminality of boda boda and the possibility that it will be converted into militias under the sway of politicians, his prescription for the boda boda problem should be taken with a massive dose of scepticism.

Prof. Mutua is now a more or less permanent resident of Nairobi City so he cannot pretend not to see that boda boda are just one element of the public transport dysfunction in the City, and in the republic. Nairobi City's public (and private) road network is badly and dangerously designed. It prioritises the mass movement of passenger cars, and eschews many modern safety features to reduce road traffic accidents and promote the safe, efficient and effective movement of people from place to place.

If Prof. Mutua cares to remember, the 1970s and 1980s public transport system in Nairobi City resembled that of many European cities. Of course, the private motor vehicle ownership numbers were quite low, the City's population had not succumbed to the mass influx of rural Kenyans after the collapse of agriculture, and City Hall and the Public Works Department had not fully embraced procurement fraud to the extent they did. Boda boda, and many other transport sector scofflaws like matatus, simply took advantage of a broken system, and continue to operate with impunity because the corrective measures necessary to protect Kenyans and provide them with safe, efficient, affordable and effective transport services are not being prioritised by the Government.

If we were to compare Prof. Mutua's bugbears to private motorists, many similarities emerge. A substantial proportion of private motorists do not observe the Highway Code, often drive into oncoming traffic, will not give way even when they are required to, will park in undesignated places, will flee from road accident sites if police are not immediately on-scene, will install ultra-bright LED and halogen headlights and switch them to high beam even when it is not necessary, and on and on and on. Indeed, much of the animus against boda boda is because private motorists cannot get away with half of the stunts that boda boda get away with and it makes private motorists, like the chauffeur-driven Prof. Mutua, green with envy.

A small subset of private motorists are so much worse than boda boda: the senior public officer in hurry. Many road users have been the victims of GK-plated Land Cruiser Prados driven on the wrong side of the road, usually with three or four chase cars in tow, at high speed, horns and sirens blaring, and ultra-bright halogen lights flashing in oncoming motorists' eyes, making already terrible traffic situations worse.  Prof. Mutua talks of the risks posed by no-plate boda bodas and refuses to even acknowledge the existential threat prosed by no-plate silver/grey Subaru Foresters and Subaru Outbacks operated by heavily armed and masked un-uniformed secret police units abducting Kenyans off the streets in broad daylight. What is good for the goose, sir, is good for the gander. Boda boda are a reflection of the Government and the Government's priorities. Boda boda stared into the abyss that is public transport in Kenya, and the abyss stared right back.

Before Prof. Mutua addresses the speck in the boda boda's eye, he should take time to remove the massive mote in the Government's eye. If we address the shortcomings in public transport in a holistic fashion, the boda boda menace will be tamed. Thus, we must begin by prioritising the safe, efficient, affordable and effective movement of people from place to place. This can be done by slowing down the massive investment in extra public roads and extra public road lanes, and increasing the public investment in bus termini, bus stages, dedicated bus lanes, safe and inclusive pedestrian walkways (you would be shocked how difficult it is for persons with disabilities to traverse the Central Business District), and the operations of PSV buses and matatus. I hope Prof. Mutua and his fellow unhappy wabenzi are listening.

The effects of antisocial media

Online spaces have lost much of the utility they offered when they were first popularised in the early 2010s. They have become spaces where highly motivated agitators will go to wage wars that, on closer inspection, advance no fresh ideas or address any matters of contemporary notoriety. Trolls have taken over, and trollish behaviour is encouraged. Complex software algorithms channel the worst trends o your timeline and it is only an active curation of your timeline that will ensure that you do not fall prey to the machinations of the trolls, though this doesn't always work.

In Kenya, the social media space is dominated by young people, classified in the popular lexicon as GenZ. Some are thoughtful and wise beyond their years. The vast majority, though, are badly educated and aren't shy about flaunting their bad education for all the world to see. What they are interested in, it seems, is the total number of likes and retweets they will receive for the stuff they spout. In short, they seek widespread notoriety, if not fame or infamy, no matter what.

What is increasingly noticeable about them is how very little they read about the things they purport to speak about. Few of them have taken the time to review the documents of their civic life, whether it is the Constitution or the Laws of Kenya, or the foundational documents of the various societies, organisations and associations they happen to be members of. They extract a sentence from these documents, apply their own biased lenses to any analysis of those sentences, and then publish their half-baked views for all the world to see and when they are called out for it, instead of taking lessons from the criticism, they double down and invite hordes of equally-uninformed trolls to support their viewpoints.

These people are, as a result, easily manipulated. You can tell by how easy it has been for the 527/= gangs to hijack hashtags and promote reactionary views that are contrary to the stated desires of GenZ agitators. Instead of prosecuting their ideas, GenZs are forced to counter the subversion of their agenda by the 527/= gangs, and in the end, their GenZ agenda is never implemented and the movement of the day fizzles out.

This is apparent in the way GenZ have been outmanoeuvred when it comes to public finances. The victory they won at such terrible cost in 2024 with the withdrawal of the Finance Bill has not been replicated. Though a valiant effort was mounted in 2025, and the same terrible outcome for GenZ was visited not hem once more, they have not fundamentally altered the structure of public finance or how public money is collected, spent, ad accounted for. This was recently revealed by their utter lack of understanding of what it means for the Government to borrow.

Many of us, whether GenZ, Gent, Millennial or Boomer, are motivated with deeply selfish interests and nowadays, we are not shy about stating this upfront. It is no longer about the commonweal; what matters is the individual stomach. Because reactionary forces, whether political, professional, social or cultural, have spent the decades since Mwai Kibaki's presidential electoral victory in 2002 subverting the common good, and promoting selfish person interests, the structures that would have built resilience among and for the people have withered and atrophied. Brief spurts of harambees for Genz protest victims only starkly reveal how far apart we are as peoples.

If rational discussions cannot be held among people, regardless of the stated desire for reform and change, little will occur, and shattered dreams will litter the online spaces, where performative wailing and gnashing of teeth will take place. The irony of faster and wider telecommunications among the largest proportion of the population being used to divide them and poison the civic bonds among them is not lost on me. Social media, it turns out, is dangerously antisocial.

Don't fall for it, Hanifa.

Someone has set a trap for Haifa and it will be interesting to see whether she will fall into it. Let me explain.

One of the most effective ways to undermine civil society in Kenya has been to co-opt its members into the firmament of the State. After 2002, Mwai Kibaki was acutely aware that he would not govern if he was constantly facing off against civil society. So he appointed its members to public offices, and promoted the political ambitions of others. His government enacted laws that created positions for civil society representatives. (The Law Society of Kenya was a prime victim of this tactic.) It paid off.

If it wasn't for the KANU holdovers in Kibaki's government, and Kibaki's own KANU-ist instincts, epitomised by the reckless and wanton extra-judicial killings and widespread looting by Kibaki and his cronies, civil society would never have gotten the second wind it did that culminated in the 2010 constitution. But the principle of the thing remains true: co-opted civil society hard-asses will spend so much time trying to "reform government from within" that they will fail to realise that they have been swallowed by Leviathan.

There is a nascent, but seemingly determined, effort to put Hanifa up as a candidate in the next general election as the woman representative of Nairobi City County. If she falls for it, she will lose everything she has built for herself the past two years, the least not being her name and her identity. If you think this is hyperbolic fearmongering, search on YouTube for the video of the day the President signed the Finance Bill into law and see the meek image that Millie Odhiambo cut at State House. She looks so out of place and one wonders if she knows that she is no longer the fearless lioness she was when the Security Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2014, was introduced in the National Assembly.

There is no institution better at sanding down your naturally rough instincts to stand up for the weak and forgotten than Parliament. It doesn't matter whether you enter Parliament as an independent or as a member of a political party; your name and identity are swallowed up in the maw of an institution that no longer represents the interests of the people but only the interests of parliamentarians and, whenever it is profitable so to do, the interests of the executive branch of the Government. And if Parliament will not co-opt you, it will isolate you, and you will be a lone voice in the wilderness, a person of legislative irrelevance. Can you think of one effective reformer in Parliament today?

As a member of the Committee of Experts, Otiende Amollo agreed with and promoted the constitutional principle of the separation of powers. The executive would make and implement policies, including development policies. Parliament would enjoy the power of the purse, that is, it would decide whether or not to fund any of the executive branch's development policies. But witness the recent determined push by Mr Amollo and his colleagues to "entrench CDF in the Constitution" so that they can undermine several judgments of the constitutional court, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court that "CDF is unconstitutional". The reformers, like Mr. Omtatah, have been isolated and ignored and their strongly held beliefs about the role of Parliament have been received by their parliamentary colleagues the same way one receives a fart in a poorly ventilated room.

A woman representative is just one person among 349 parliamentarians, a single member of an institution that requires collective action to get anything done. Mr. Omtatah, frustrated that he has not gotten any of his colleagues on his side, has spent a great part of his time in the Senate litigating in the constitutional courts to hamstring the work that the Senate (and National Assembly) has done and continues to do. He has had limited success, but this is exactly what he did when he was in civil society before he was elected. His election did not change the trajectory of his life; in fact, it could be argued that it undermined it greatly.

Hanifa faces the same challenges that Judge Maraga faces. Unless she can marshal a cohort of like-minded women and men to contest for the 349 elected parliamentary seats and 1,150 elected county seats, she will be a lone voice in an institution that is expert at co-opting, or stifling, lone voices. She shouldn't fall into this trap.

Saba Saba at Thirty-five

I was a boy when Kamukunji became a battleground between the restore-multiparty zealots and Baba Moi. And a boy, I filtered the political questions of the day through the lens of my parents' anxieties. It is thirty-five years since "the opposition" forced Moi to decree that Section 2A of the former constitution would be repealed and Kenya would be restored to multi-party politics.

The more things change, the more thee stay the same.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr  (1849).

History is a funny thing. The longer you live, the more you forget, the more you must be reminded by those who are younger than you. The Seven Bearded Sisters initiated a sequence of political events that culminated in the restoration of multiparty democracy. They could not have predicted how wildly the pendulum would swing against the principles they held or, even more wildly, how many of the pro-democracy campaigners would betray those principles or how.

Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibakli oversaw a security apparatus that murdered pro-democracy campaigners with impunity. Extra-judicial executions of Kenyans fighting for a more democratic political environment defines some of the darkest moments of the Kenya political project. In 2025, the political environment is redolent of the accusations of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. In many cases, the same faces feature. Where once they were bit players in a larger political narrative, today, they are star players.

What has not changed is that the pro-democracy campaigners are young, educated and highly motivated. They will not win, though, unless they learn the lessons of the 1990s and 2000s. They must eschew the narrative that revolutionary change ends with the toppling of an existing order. They must accept that the project they are engaged in is a multi-generational one, one that will require the highest level of dedication and sacrifice for the longest period and that it shall need to be handed off to successive generations who, even in the most optimistic scenarios, may not enjoy the fruits of.

One of the defining features of the 1990s was the fracturing of "the opposition" and the co-option by Moi's KANU of opposition stalwarts. Many "ate ugali" in State House. They never lived down the accusations of betrayal and died as pariahs. Many "crossed the floor" of the National Assembly and entered into "coalitions" with the ruling party. What they got in return was lucrative public tenders that were never closely scrutinised by the Controller and Auditor-General - or Parliament.

I was in India when the Congress government of Inder Kumar Gujral fell. I was still there when the BJP government of Atal Behari Vajpayee succumbed to the anti-Muslim Hindu supremacism of the RSS and Sangh Parivar culminating in the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom. The six years between the two events demonstrated to me the value of a coherent ideological consistency for a political party. The relatively swift destruction of the Congress's socialism between the election of Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda and the resignation of IK Gujral was mirrored by the ascension of AB Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. In the former, the party stopped believing in its own ideology; in the latter, the party solidified its ideology, purged the party of Doubting Thomases, and cemented its own rule for the next two decades, culminating inn the ascension of the Hindu purist, Narendra Modi.

Kenya's Gen Z, violently effective as they may be, do not have a coherent political ideology. They will never take political power so long as this remains true. They are a mirror to the ideological nakedness of the Second Liberation Movement: it was only invested in the restoration of multiparty democracy, and no more. Saba Saba 1990 forced Moi to recalibrate his politics; it did not establish an alternative political philosophy and therefore, it was easy to fracture the opposition.

We are in 2025. The names in the parliamentary Hansard are almost all new. The same narrative is being told, though. Laws that make no sense. Constitutional amendments that cement politicians' power but offer nothing for the electorate. "Activists" demanding "change" but whose members are only held together by vague promises of "full implementation of the constitution" and not much else. The Gen Z may have developed into a political force; but they have no political identity or ideology. (These contradictions befuddle me, I promise.) Thirty-five years after Saba Saba, the shedding of blood is the same; the lack of ideology is the same; will the political outcome be the same?

What goes around, comes around

Toadies are an exhausting lot. There is one in the senate, and I won't say for whom he toadies, who's fat smug face arouses a deep and baleful rage that it is a wonder he has not been smothered in his bed by the woman he shares it with. There is another one in the National Assembly who speaks with cut-glass kizungu who does so much to remind the people why they hate her and hate her with a passion that it boggles the mind that her not-so-great wealth and power has so far managed to insulate her from the national bile she inspires.

These sorts of people can be found in all sorts of places. They all have the same qualities, though: they are just decently smart enough to be noticed but not so smart as to make anything meaningful of themselves. They are very good at sussing out the direction of the wind, even if the wind happens to be their patrons farting in their face. And because their noses are so finely tuned to wind-direction, they know when to lay supine for the boss's belly rub and when to push whoever happens to be in the vicinity into the path of their boss's inevitable rageful flip-out. And their bosses ragefully flip out a great many times.

They are excellent snitches and, in this day and social media age, expert snitch-taggers. The more successfully they toady, the more they are rewarded, and they usually turn these rewards into armies of 578/= snitch-tagging bloggers who do nothing but parrot the praise-singing of the toadies. They are also well acquainted with the use-and-dump philosophy; so long as it is in their masters' interest, they will use you, abuse you, and dump you faster than they dispose of the prophylactics they use during their more careful assignations. Yet, they forget, they too, are equally disposable.

This is, in fact, their defining characteristic. They assume airs and turn their noses up at the rest of us, believing that the boss would never turn on them. They step on toes and bury knives in so many rivals' backs, it is a wonder that don't notice the blood trails they leave behind wherever they go. This blindspot stays firmly in place until the day they are replaced by brand new toadies. When their usefulness ends, because they no longer pay attention to the task at hand, their fall from grace is so abrupt and so violent, many never recover.

A former chief justice cuts a pitiable sight these days. When he was at the height of his powers, members of the Bar and Bench feared him, and grown men and women quaked in their shoes in terror whenever he turned his attention to them. He wielded power with a brutal viciousness, all in the service of the man he served. He was pitiless. He was remorseless. He was relentless. He did it all to please his master. Then the end came. It was quick. It was brutal. One minute he was in in. The next minute he was a pariah.

Gone were the whispered silences whenever he entered a room; he no longer had rooms to enter. Gone were the furtive glances whenever he passed one by; now even children stare him dead in the eye without fear. Gone was the respectful attention with which people listened to his declamations; now he is lucky if a matatu kange notices he has asked for his thirty-bob change back. Toadies think that they will reign with their masters forever. And while karma doesn't exactly work that way, what goes around, comes around.

What is Judge Maraga playing at?

When Mr. Okiya Omtatah was elected in 2022, his election as declared at several polling stations in Busia County. Several judgments of Kenya's superior courts have ruled that the election results at the polling station are final; the results at the county level declaring, for example, Mr. Omtatah to be elected as the Senator of Busia County, are tallies of the results from the polling stations within the county. If Mr. Omtatah wanted to ensure that he was not cheated of his victory, he would have had an agent to represent his interests in each of the 760 polling stations in Busia County.

Now Mr. Omtatah, and Chief Justice Emeritus David Maraga are eyeing the presidency. Mr. Omtatah is familiar with the cut-and-thrust of an election to the senate, though on a considerably smaller scale to that of a presidential election which in 2022 consisted of around 56,000 polling stations. Judge Maraga is not so lucky.

While he may have a clue as to the scale of a presidential election - after all, as Chief Justice he presided over a presidential election petition at which statistics were bandied about by the parties - he has not yet participated in a cutthroat contest such as the one a presidential election usually is. What little we know of his plans to secure victory in the presidential election does not inspire confidence.

The presidential election consists of the election results at each of the 56,000 polling stations as captured in Forms 34A, the tallies at the county level captured in Forms 34B, and the final tall at the national tallying centre captured in Form 34C. If he is well-prepared (and well-resourced), he will have at least one agent at the 56,000 polling stations, 47 agents at the county tallying centre, and a battery of agents, lawyers, political operatives and supporters at the national tallying centre to ensure that none of his votes is stolen. For this to be true, he needs to have started the onerous job of setting up from scratch a ground game to mobilise supporters who will volunteer time, resources and energy to support his candidature, whether he stands in the election as an independent or as a candidate sponsored by a political party.

Since he has not declared that he is a registered member of a political party yet, we shall assume that he is still mulling where to pitch his tent or he is seriously considering a dark horse campaign as an independent. Either way, he still needs a team to help him organise his campaign.

First, he needs forty-seven county team leaders. They will help him map the 290 and constituencies and identify the current 1,150 elected county assembly representatives, 290 constituency representatives, 47 county woman representatives, 47 senate representatives, 47 county governors and deputy county-governors, 47 speakers of county assemblies, 47 clerks of county assemblies, 47 county secretaries, and the nominated members of the National Assembly, Senate and County Assemblies, together with he political parties that sponsored them to the various legislatures, and the strength or weakness of the incumbents.

He will need all this baseline data to decide whether he should sponsor his own slate of candidates or poach the incumbents from the political affiliations they are members of. The dossiers will be voluminous and tedious to read. But read he must. This is not swotting for the Bar; its way more difficult than that.

Second, he will need to commission several polls to gauge his level of popularity at this point, to gauge the most resonant political questions that he can exploit, to gauge the level of support the incumbents enjoy, to gauge the level of opposition he is likely to face when the campaign is up and running, among a host of many other political issues.

Third, he will need to identify the sources of his campaign finances to pay for the cost of campaigning. County offices. County staff. County volunteers. Cars. Airplane tickets or charters. Airtime. Internet data bundles. Computers. Mobile phones. Meals. Hotel accommodation. Several thousand line items in a complex budget.

Fourth he will need to form a headquarters team of campaign staff. Lawyers (of course). Accountants. Personnel managers. Finance managers. Transport officers. Drivers. Bodyguards. IT technicians. Webpage developers. Telephone operators (or their modern-day equivalent). Mailroom gremlins. Secretaries. Personal assistants. Messengers. Dozens of jobs that have nothing to do with politics have to be staffed up over a matter of months.

Fifth, he needs to fashion a manifesto. The Message he will campaign on. The political brand he will fashion for himself. It is not just vibes and Inshallah. Professional politicians have been doing this for as long as he has been an adult. He is starting the race at the back of the pack and whether he can build a brand that can surpass the current brand in power is all a matter of intuition and storytelling. Judge Maraga is not an intuitive or natural storyteller.

So far, he appears happy to portray himself as a man who has announced that he intends to seek the presidency. He doesn't not appear to be doing much else. While there is a coterie of social media mavens and dingbats who will sing his praises to the moon and back, they do not appear to be a political campaign team of any sort. Time flies when you're in the aluminium siding business, as they say in the United States. If he is not careful, Judge Maraga will blink and find himself locked out of the ballot for want of a real political campaign strategy.

The people shall

This is my view, and no one else's: a constitution is a piece of paper until enough citizens take the necessary steps to respect, protect and uphold the constitution. In Kenya, the mistake that many learned friends have made is to assume that the constitution will only be "implemented" after the state, state officers, state agents and state organs respect, protect and uphold the constitution. They are, respectfully, wrong.

There is a lot that the state can do to celebrate the highest principles of the constitution, but the state will not do any of those things unless the people make it. Kenya's Second Republic was promulgated in 2010 and one very day thereafter, there are many courageous Kenyans who took it upon themselves to live according to the edict in Article 3, Clause (1) of the Constitution of Kenya. One of the seminal moments in this battle was the decisive (after a fashion) defeat of the BBI process that sought to ameliorate the suffering of the political classes while trampling on the wishes and desires of the peoples of this fair land.

I say "ameliorate" because a careful examination of the proposals that received the greatest support of the political classes was the expansion of the unelected offices that politicians would be entitled to after a general election. These unelected positions, ostensibly to ensure that "no part of Kenya is left out of Government" were intended to establish a post-election coalition in all but name between the majority party, the minority party and the unhappy losers in presidential and gubernatorial elections so that they would not foment opposition to the government of the day.

Household economic questions were given short shrift; the cost of living is the highest it has ever been, never mind the posh-sounding pablums by the Council of Economic Advisors. Mr. Miguna Miguna's proposal to slash the take-home salaries of elected state officers did not even receive the courtesy of a response. The proposal by Mr. Ekuru Aukot to create a more equitable parliament, fifty/fifty between men and women and fewer in number (aka Punguza Mizigo Bill), was rejected out of hand. Mr. Okiya Omtatah's campaign to audit the public debt has been opposed at every turn by successive governments. In short, the people's needs were not on the table; the needs of fat-cat politicians, used to the truffles of the state, took centre stage.

It is only when enough citizens impose their will on the state that the constitution will be implemented in full. It will not be implemented only if the only thing you have in your hand is a court order. Take the BBI fiasco as a guide: while it was defeated in the law courts, the current parliament has taken upon itself to revive the process on its own motion, with a few parliament-specific goals in tow. This time round, despite several judgments of the superior court, parliament is plowing full-steam ahead with parliamentarians' desire to "entrench CDF in the constitution". Mealy-mouthed explanations about the "benefits of CDF" fly in the express findings of the superior courts: Kenya does not need wasteful public funds purporting to implement programmes of national and county governments.

It has been twelve months since the government faced the brunt of the anger of young Kenyans and the president "withdrew" the Finance Bill 2024 after it had been enacted by parliament. What Kenyans did on that terrible day last year was to espouse the highest principles of the constitution to respect, protect and uphold the constitution. They were back on the streets of many cities and towns of Kenya on the one year anniversary. Their resolve does not appear to have waned despite a year of propaganda and search engine optimisation by propagandists of the state. Constitutions are not self-executing instruments; they require the blood, sweat and toil of the people to make any kind of sense. Kenyans demonstrate this truism with a resolve that should terrify the men and women who have chosen to suborn and pervert the constitutional order.

Judge Maraga's other choice

Chief Justice Maraga (Emeritus) gave an interview on the 18th June, 2025, where he announced that he intended to stand in the net presidential election. The interview covered a broad range of current political questions, and the announcement was treated with little enthusiasm by the interviewer, Mr. Joe Ageyo. It is a sign of the seriousness, or lack thereof, that Judge Maraga's presidential ambitions is treated.

A very, very small straw poll among my online horde (which is not dispositive of anything) supports the idea that Judge Maraga is in the wrong campaign. He beat out a relatively strong field to be appointed as Kenya's second Chief Justice under the 2010 Constitution. As head of the Judiciary, he tried his best to advance the administration of justice by expanding the real estate development of the Judiciary and keeping out of political contests. That is until his Supreme Court nullified the 2017 presidential election which he followed up by calling for the dissolution of Parliament for failing to meet the Tw-thirds Gender Rule. Anyway, I digress.

Judge Maraga was a good judge and a good Chief Justice, never mind what the likes of Senior Counsel Ahmednasir Abdullahi say about him. During the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic, he ensured that the courts continued to function efficiently and even after Uhuru Kenyatta and his henchmen "revisited" the Judiciary by slashing the Judiciary budget so viciously it is a wonder it continued to function in the dying days of Uhuru's presidency. Even his leadership of the Judicial Service Commission did not elicit the kind of carping that accompanies those sorts of high offices. Nevertheless, I am slowly succumbing to the argument that despite his many qualities and qualifications, he is not well-suited to be elected Kenya's sixth president.

Lawyers, especially Kenyan lawyers who have had long legal careers like Judge Maraga, generally, make for bad politicians. A perusal of the parliamentary Hansard on the performance of lawyers in both the National Assembly and Senate reveal that they are champion debaters, but they are too easily enamoured of legalism to make proper political choices that will benefit not just their constituents but the Republic as well. If you look at the decision by the lawyers sitting in the National Assembly to defy the Supreme Court regarding the Constituencies Development Fund, you will see what I am talking about. These people, in my estimation, should not be trusted to hold elected office, certainly not the presidency.

In Judge Maraga's case, if he truly wishes to serve, there is one place where his particular strength of character will be of immense value: the State Law Office. Kenya is ripe for an Attorney-General who is not afraid to do the right thing, liwe liwalo, and Judge Maraga has demonstrated the ability to cut through the political faff and present the legal case over matters of national importance. Of course he will need to brush up on his political and interpersonal skills, but what he currently possesses is well-suited to being Mwanasheria Mkuu and Mkuu wa Sheria all rolled into one.

This is true of the other lawyers cosplaying at politics. Their particular skills are well suited to sitting on the Bench or representing the State at the State Law Office or the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Indeed, if we are to amend the current statutory framework, I would recommend amending all the laws that provide that the chairman of a constitutional commission should have the qualifications of a judge. If you are not appointing a Judge or magistrate, that qualification only serves to entrench lawyering into administrative frameworks for which lawyering is a liability, not an asset. And yes, that includes the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, Commission on Administrative Justice, National gender and Equality Commission and Judicial Service Commission (which should never, ever have been headed by the CJ to begin with).

If Judge Maraga wishes to serve the people of Kenya once more in a consequential way, he should eschew the presidency and instead hitch his wagon to a presidential candidate who has the necessary probity he wishes to bring to the table and serve in that government as the principal legal advisor to the Government. In that position, he would have the opportunity to sweep away the legacies of odious monsters like Charles Njonjo and instead, revivify among the State Counsels a sense of duty and honour that seems to be waning these days.

Will the real Judge Maraga please stand up

Some of the men (and women) whom we think are incorrigibly stupid only appear to be so because of the facade they put on. Anyone who can persuade a constituency to re-elect him, election after election, can hardly be described as stupid, even as he (or she) does a whole bunch of things that make no damn sense. What we must ask is this: how come so many bad men (and women) keep getting elected while the paragons of virtue who we have placed on pedestals keep falling by the electoral wayside?

The answer, I believe, lies in the ability of the so-called bad candidates to organise politics organisations dedicated to their election/re-election and the inability of their novice would-be challengers to do the same. There is the much larger population of such truly unpleasant men (and women) who will never get elected, even if they did the hard work of establishing political machines in support of their electoral ambitions.

It is damnedly difficult to set up an election ground game in Kenya at the best of times. It is twice as difficult if you want to set one up without an existing (and successful) political party to offer any form support. While Kenya has a massive number of registered political parties, few of them have successfully sent a candidate to Parliament or a county assembly, and those that fail to build up on electoral successes tend to flat out at the next general election. Be that as it may, a well-organised and well-run political party is essential to electoral success.

I say all this to speculate at the chances of Chief Justice emeritus David Maraga. Judge Maraga appears to have cast his die in presidential electoral politics and is traversing the country and appearing at political events to sell himself as a candidate at tech next general election. Those who support his campaign point to his integrity (which is considerably high). So far, he has not given any reason to consider that he is not fit to be president of this republic. Except one.

He does not appear to be a member of a political party and no political party appears to have hitched its wagons to his prospective candidacy. While he appears to be surrounded by a team of committed supporters, that is all it seems: in the absence of a political structure of any sort, I am let to wonder whether the men and women singing his praises wherever he goes, who shout the loudest about his credentials, and who bristle at any doubt against their candidate, are the parasites that afflict all political candidates and suck out the lifeblood of a political campaign.

Judge Maraga, at this stage in the proceedings, should have completed the arduous task of establishing and registering a political party (especially if he was never joining an existing political outfit). He should have began to identify candidates for the 1,350 elected county assembly seats, a slate of special interest seat nominees (women, youth, PWDs), candidates for the 290 elected national assembly seats, 47 woman representative seats, 47 elected senate seats, and the slates of special interest seats in both chambers of Parliament. And collectively, they should have started recruitment of members of their political party and, crucially, fundraising from these members to sustain their campaign. He does not appear to have done any of these things. How does he expect to be elected?

"Integrity" is not a political philosophy or ideology. What, beyond, "anti-corruption", is his politics made up of? How much of the public purse is he going to dedicate to the brick-and-mortar "development" or roads and affordable houses and how much of it is going to dedicate to paying a real wage to the perennially neglected healthcare workers and basic education teachers? Will he expand the size of the presidential fleet with diesel-guzzling armoured SUVs and German limousines or will he, finally, abolish VIP transport for the entire national and county executive and, instead, invest that wasteful expenditure in public safety? These, and dozens upon dozens of ideological questions remain unanswered and undermine his presidential campaign before it has even official began.

If Judge Maraga wants to be President and Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces, he cannot afford to confine his political campaign to visiting courtrooms where "activists" are being prosecuted or "GenZ" rallies where the most important feature of the rallies is his presence. If he doesn't build a political movement, consisting of a political party, electoral candidates, a political ideology, and a campaign finance fund-raising team, he will be remembered (if at all) for being just one more dilettante who showed so much promise and flamed out so pitiably.

Time's up, boomer

Kenya’s leadership is overwhelmingly grey and male. Captains of industry, ministers of religion, government bureaucrats, elected politicians and, yes, trades union leaders, are more likely to have seen more decades on Earth than the average Kenyan. Many die while still in their harnesses, having clung on to their positions of power and authority long beyond it made any sense for them to be there in the first place. Many cling on because they fear the obscurity that comes with being “retired”.

Some, though a precious few, maintain a quick mind, possess and share a wealth of wisdom, and offer leadership when the impatience of youth rears its head and threatens the established order of things. The vast majority of the geriatrics who won’t let go keep to themselves. But a small minority simply can’t let go and won’t shut up about what they have done for us. They are a pestilential plague upon the land.

In recent days, one of those old men has taken it upon himself to justify his continued presence atop one of Kenya's most important institutions, an institution that was established to champion the rights of unionised labour. He knee-jerk response to the demand by a youthful rights activist to step aside and allow fresh blood at the helm of the institution is par for the course for old men who believe, almost always erroneously, that they are indispensable.

In an inexplicable screed that was published in one of Kenya's leading tabloids, he set down in excruciating detail what he had done to bring Kenyan labour closer to employers and closer to the government in a tripartite agreement that he is absulotely certain has been a boon to Kenyan employees. (Why the tabloid chose to publish this remarkable waste of column inches only the misguided editors of that rag can explain.) He followed up with a spectacularly insanely long tweet trying to paint the object of his animus as an untrustworthy conwoman who stole millions of shillings entrusted to her for the care, treatment and support of victims of police violence during the anti-Finance-Bill-2024 protests.

It was completely lost on him that everything he had written down in response to what he had been accused of - overstaying in leadership beyond all reason - did not once address that core question. In his mind, because he "oversaw" the enactment of five landmark labour laws, and "contributed" to the promulgation of Article 41 (found in the Bill of Rights) of the Constitution on labour relations, there was no reason to respond to the fact that he had overstayed in leadership and that it was high time he stood aside and allowed younger persons to step into the breech.

This sort of intellectual intransigence is all too common in all manner of institutions. But change is coming, whether the old men accept it or not. Voters have begun the arduous task of weeding out the geriatrics from Parliament and the drip-drip-drip of electoral replacements will become a flood soon enough. C-suites in corporate Kenya are seeing wazee being put out to pasture; more and more CEOs are men and, increasingly, women in their forties and fifties, rather than cranky grey-hairs in their seventies. Ministries of religion have many Gen Z preachers, though much of their religious ministry causes great spiritual discomfort even among their youthful flocks.

This old man's time is up. Only he seems to think that it is not.

The glue of our politics

The glue that holds Kenya's politics together is hypocrisy. Would-be saviour, those ones with the Uranus-sized egos, those whom the gods whisper in their ears, "You are the one", they practice hypocrisy to such perfection that not even the approbation of their families sticks to them. We have been witness to their machinations for generations yet we still fall for their false promises and outright lies because our need to believe is greater than our instincts for scepticism and doubt.

We used to be able to tell the charlatans from the lesser charlatans. Our politics may have been deeply tribalistic and very violent, but we were never under the illusion that the men and few women we sent to bunge were driven by our interests. We knew who they were and for the most part, we didn't care too much what they did so long as they didn't steal our wives (which they still did, but not too much) or our goats (which they continued to do, but not all of them) and contributed to church fundraisers (where they gave their small-small thousands and kept their mouths shut about it).

Then we elected Mwai Kibaki and for a brief ninety-day period, we were the Most Optimistic People In The World. We fell for a terrible lie: One Man Can Change The World. What came before laid the foundation for that optimism: Raila Odinga and the rest of the Opposition somehow found the will to set aside their tribal animosities to unite against Baba Moi's project: Uhuru Kenyatta and Musalia Mudavadi, one the son of Kenya's first president-for-life, one the son of one of Baba Moi's most loyal tribal satraps.

Mwai Kibaki, Leader of the Official Opposition, and Raila Odinga, son of Kenya's most difficult vice-presidents, joined hands, and strung together a winning presidential campaign that began with "Kibaki Tosha!" and culminated in "Yote Yawezekana Bila Moi!" It didn't last. By the end of the ninety days, Mwai Kibaki was an invalid, and his Mount Kenya tribal satraps had pushed out Raila Odinga from any kind of decision making, the V-P would soon die in a hospital in London, his successor would keep his head down and eat his supper in silence, and Kenya hurtled towards a constitutional referendum that would shatter the 2003 illusions to smithereens.

By the time the dust had settled after the 2005 referendum, the die was cast; Kenyans would never see an honest bone in any politician ever again. You can see the aftermath of that referendum in some of the political operatives flitting about TV studios these days. Some have come up as a result of the activism and advocacy of young people, particularly after the 2024 anti-Finance-Bill protests, and they have swiftly adopted the hypocritical positions of political godfathers who will discard them as soon as their youthful usefulness is spent. One of the political gadflies of the day, with a penchant for fancy three-piece suits and an English vocabulary that hides the shallowness of his ethics, is a particularly galling example of the extent to which political hypocrisies have spread.

But it is the middle-aged cohort that continues to appall and disconcert in equal measure. On TV, they say all the right things. On WhatsApp, they bow and scrape before the doyens of political hypocrisy with such fervour, it is a wonder they don't develop a permanent crick in their spines for all the contorting they have to do. One, claiming bona fides in energy justice, is particularly expert at running with the hares and hunting with the hounds, painting herself as a champion of the weak and vulnerable all the while seeking a place at the high table of energy sector decision-making.

We should know better. Our window of opportunity to put Kenya on the long and arduous road to political and economic revivification came and went in the smoke and mirrors of grand corruption and the looting of the national coffers. That opportunity will not come by ever again unless the gods deign to give us another chance.

Thy name is vanity

How many thought that Mr. Omtatah's "exploratory committee" would run out of steam this fast? While Mr. Omtatah's novel approach was encouraging, it was hobbled by a common mistake made by all also-ran presidential candidates since the return of multi-party politics: the hubris of one man who thinks that he doesn't need the political party that sponsored him to Parliament.

Mr. Omtatah's path to the Senate was a relentless one. A stalwart of the "good governance" civil society set, he set himself apart by suing the Government (and winning) over the way public money was spent. His litigation record is the envy of many and his achievements cannot be gainsaid. When he put himself forward to stand in the Busia County senate election, I feared that his victory would not lead to the kind of change he thought he could bring to Parliament. I was right; Mr. Omtatah does not appear to have sponsored a single Bill since his election. He has kept on suing the national executive over the Finance Bill; but he has not sponsored a single Bill.

He is not the activist-turned-elected-politician to discover that governing, unlike activism, is not a one-man show. As a member of the Senate, he is part of the Government, and as part of his remit, is participating in the law-making function of Parliament. Sponsoring and participating in litigation has its benefits; but it is a costly affair and does not always lead to the outcome one hoped for. As the Finance Act 2023 demonstrated, even when you win, you still lose.

Mr. Omtatah was elected to the wrong chamber. For sure, there's a lot that the Senate can do to improve the lives of the people but the Senate is not where one wants to be of one hopes to affect real change to the way public money is spent. For that, one needs to be in the National Assembly where the Budget Outlook and Review Paper, Budget Policy Statement, Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure, Finance Bill and Appropriation Bill will be introduced and debated.

But even more important than that is the ability to "work well with others". Mr. Omtatah does not appear to have found that gear yet. Parliamentary practice is replete with the kind of horse-trading that undermines public confidence in the institutions of government. In the modern parlance, such horse-trading is the necessary evil one must engage in if they wish to change lives for the better. Mr. Omtatah's lack of a legislative record would seem to imply that he does not want to horse-trade with his Senate colleagues. I don't see how he will have a successful parliamentary or presidential career if he believes that he can govern alone.

It might be that his exploratory committee has gone quiet so that it can collate the data it has collected since it was appointed last year. If that is so, the members of the committee might want to tell him that he needs to work with his parliamentary colleagues even if it means holding his nose in the process. He must put forward legislation he believes will help the people. If he won't even do that, why should the people even consider his putative presidential candidacy as anything but a vanity project?