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.