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.