Bullshit reasons and constitutional rights

It's fascinating to watch the libertarians and bill of rights zealots twisting themselves in knots as they argue that political contestation must be tied to some reasonable and rational objective. In their world, the bill of rights does not just serve the purpose of recognising, affirming, protecting and enjoying rights and fundamental freedoms, but in order for the bill of rights to make sense, the exercise of those rights or fundamental freedoms can only make sense if there's a rationale and logical objective. In short, for example, one cannot just pick "demonstration" as the bit of Article 37 of the Constitution of Kenya as the right to exercise, but the exercise of that right must be, and only be, to present a petition to a public authority and that the petition must serve some rational and logical purpose. You can't have a bullshit reason to hold a political demonstration.

Obviously I think that position is, well, bullshit.

You cannot have a liberal constitutional democracy if the limitations on the bill of rights are limitations tied to neo-liberal and capitalist philosophies of utility, profit and economic advancement. The constitution, as someone rightfully argued, serves the people; it is not the people who serve the constitution.

What Raila Odinga attempted on the 20th March was to exercise, as fully as possible, his rights under Article 37. Sure, he "declared" the 20th March to be a public holiday. Only a moron thinks that his declaration was [a] the unauthorised exercise of State authority or [b] an unlawful attempt to establish a government otherwise than in compliance with the Constitution of Kenya. Sensible Kenyans understood that what he was doing was pressing his demands in the language that resonated with the tens of thousands of Kenyans who agree with him. Also, no one can ignore the fact that he ignored the risks associated with his maandamano; whenever he calls people out onto the streets, some of them engage in violence unprovoked. Be that as it may, Mr Odinga and the politicians who joined in his calls for maandamano had every right to exercise his rights under Article 37 even if his demands are utter bullshit and serve no reasonable or logical purpose.

We are repeatedly reminded by a highly-motivated segment of the political and economic classes that "Kenya is a capitalist society" and that political demonstrations, such as those of the 20th March, pose a risk to livelihoods and economic activity and, therefore, they must be tempered. One lawyer had the temerity to suggest that political demonstrations should last, at most, one hour and then the demonstrators should go do something meaningful, like go to work. This is the kind of bullshit that prevents Kenya from doing the work needed to build a constitutional culture.

Obviously I am not a fan of that kind of bullshit.

I don't know if Mr Odinga is on the right side of history and I don't care. I care that flimsy neo-liberal rubbish forms such a firm foundation for the watering down of the letter and spirit of the bill of rights. I care that as a consequence of such subversive reasoning, State officers see nothing wrong in actively preventing law-abiding Kenyans from exercising their constitutional rights, refuse to actively take steps to protect Kenyans' fundamental freedoms, and, instead, provoke violence as part of their strategy for winning (and losing) political arguments.

In my opinion, Mr Odinga, since at least The Handshake, continues to demonstrate why he should bow out of the political limelight. Not because his current political campaign lies on a foundation of bullshit. It does, but I don't care. Not because his hardcore supporters are blind to all reason. They are, but I don't care. Not because his core constituency is a pale shadow of what it was in 2002/2003. It is, but I don't care. It is because he is a man out of time, both with the people he would wish to rule and the ideas he should have to rule effectively. MS-DOS in a world of AI, a rotary telephone in a world of VoIP.

But no matter how over-the-hill I believe him to be, so long as he does not call for the violent overthrow of the Constitution, the State or the government, I don't care that he wants to bring his supporters to KICC every Monday and Thursday so that they can take a traffic-snarling stroll to State House. He can do that every single day for the week to his heart's content. Article 37, which a majority of adult Kenyans adopted at a referendum, affords him that right. The only, and best, way to beat Mr Odinga at his game, is to marshal the political arguments that renders his nugatory. Only good ideas can beat bad ones. Not police batons, teargas and lethal 7.62mm rifle bullets.

Bottom-up listening

I used to work for a public complaints agency in the mid-2000s. We received complaints from around the country, investigated them, attempted to resolve them using alternative dispute resolution process such as mediation and conciliation, and made recommendations to public agencies on lasting solutions. My bosses were drawn from different backgrounds, and they cared passionately about the issues we dealt with. I learnt a great deal from them on how to approach the vulnerable and forgotten peoples of Kenya, how to draw them out to state sometimes painful truths to agents of the government, and how to listen to their issues with empathy and compassion.

By the time I was leaving the agency, I think, I had formed a philosophy of what lawyering is supposed to be: solve the problems of the client before you without substituting yourself for your client. Sometimes, in order to solve the client's problem, you have to prevail in a trial before a judge, magistrate or tribunal. Sometimes, it means finding an alternative way to litigation, such as the aforementioned alternative dispute resolution processes. And sometimes the problem cannot be solved and this needs to be communicated with compassion and empathy to your client. But in all cases, it is not my ego that needs to be assuaged, but my client's problem that needs to be solved.

The past four years have seen Kenya suffer a mega-drought not experienced since the 2007/2008 El Niño/La Niña effect. As early as the 2014/2015 seasons, we knew that the situation was going to get dire and going by our history, famine was all but assured. Famine response is, to my mind, a factor of time, logistics and speed. Time to plan, the logistical capacity to acquire, position and pre-position famine relief supplies, and speed in decision-making. Secondary measures include environmental rehabilitation programmes to build resilience in at-risk communities, especially communities that rely almost exclusively on rainfall such as pastoralists.

Drought, and famine, do not just affect pastoralists in Kenya; the whole of the Horn of Africa has been affected. Somalia, South Sudan, southern Ethiopia and northern Uganda are facing the same dire situation that Kenya is. Consequently, there is a fierce competition for scarce grazing fields. What makes the situation truly dangerous is the flow of small arms into Kenya from the battlefields in Somalia, South Sudan, southern Ethiopia and northern Uganda. In my opinion, no matter how effectively small arms are mopped up from the communities in Turkana, West Pocket, Baringo, Samburu and Laikipia, so long as the disarmament does not affect Somalia, South Sudan, southern Ethiopia and northern Uganda, fresh supplies of small arms will still make their way into Kenya, and they will still contribute to the instability experienced in the areas where pasture land is to be found.

The solution, to my mind, is not to wage war against peoples who are fighting for their survival. It is not to find new, questionably legal, way to exclude them from pasture lands belonging to "other communities". The solution lies in building resilience in those communities. Resilience can only be built by rebuilding public institutions and public utilities that serve the needs of pastoral communities. One of them is a logistics network that can move large herds of livestock long distances in a short period and with minimal losses; a banking and finance system that accommodates capital created by livestock; and a livestock and livestock products marketing system that can act as an emergency off-taker for communities willing to translate their livestock herds into cash.

But in order for these kinds of lasting solutions to work, Government must learn how to talk to these communities without patronising, infantilising or threatening their members. Government officials need to leave their suits, and the air of superiority the suits go with, in Nairobi. This is the whole essence of bottom-up decision-making. You listen to the communities at risk; you listen with compassion and empathy; you listen with the aim of solving their problems, not to win a war. Any other solution will be short-lived, much-reviled, and only lead to even greater resistance in the future. I fear that the mistakes of the past are being repeated.

Mr. Odinga and the Presidents

Fifteen years ago, Raila Odinga was cheated of electoral victory. The electoral theft led to widespread violence that was ruthlessly suppressed. Many Kenyans were killed. Hundreds of thousands were displaced from their homes. If it was not for the intervention of the global community, Kenya might not have been able to put itself together again. After tense negotiations, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga agreed to form a government of national unity.

Twenty years ago, or thereabouts, Raila Odinga led his party and a bunch of other into a merger with Kanu. He was appointed the Secretary-General of the merged political party. When President Moi cheated Mr. Odinga out of a fair and transparent political party nomination process to be the presidential flag bearer, he decamped again, and led his bunch of rebels into a merger with Mwai Kibaki's Democratic Party and Charity Ngilu's Social Democratic Party, among others, and formed the National Rainbow Coalition, that went on to win the 2002 general election.

Five years ago, after months of political instability that arose after the hotly-contested 2017 presidential election, Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta shook hands and decided to bury the hatchet. Initially, William Ruth, the then Deputy President, supported The Handshake but when it became clear that Uhuru Kenyatta was deterred to renege on the agreement that he would put his weight behind Mr. Ruto for the presidency, Mr. Ruto became a bitter opponent of the arrangement. When Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga initiated the BBI process to amend the constitution, Mr. Ruto secretly financed law suits to defeat the proposals in the courts. He was successful in his efforts.

Now it is barely six months since President Ruto was sworn in as Kenya's fifth president and Mr. Odinga is sniping at his heels with his programme of political rallies aimed at weakening the President's grip on his government. Trial balloons have been floated suggesting that maybe it is time for the President and Mr. Odinga to ink their own version of a political agreement along the same lines as the agreements Mr. Odinga has had with Daniel Moi, Mwai Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta. It is, the whispers strongly insist, the only way that the new president can turn his attention to governing and dealing with the myriads of challenges facing his government, including the precarious economic situation, the dangerous effects of the prolonged drought, the violence engulfing pastoralist areas in the North Rift, and Kenya's military engagements in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The proposals for a new handshake are not as asinine as they appear; they would fall neatly into the same category as all previous Raila Odinga handshakes with Kenyan presidents. Despite his advancing age, and unkind insinuations that he is over the hill, Mr. Odinga remains the most consequential political leader in Kenya for at least three generations. Mwai Kibaki, president and all, only has two things by which we remember him: the 2007-2008 crisis and Kenya Vision 2030. Uhuru Kenyatta will be remembered for the scandals surrounding the National Youth Service, the Standard Gauge Railway and the Nairobi Expressway Project. Mr. Odinga, on the other hand, has had a hand in the 1982 attempted coup (for which he was detained for almost a decade), putting the final nail in Kanu's coffin, the rallying call in the 2002 general elections (Kibaki Tosha!) and, in one way or the other, the final push for a new constitution.

President Ruto and his acolytes would be best served by not dismissing the handshake idea out of hand. So long as Mr. Odinga can marshal tens of thousands of Kenyans, rich and poor alike, from all ethnic backgrounds, to the streets, the president cannot afford to dismiss Mr. Odinga as an old political has-been. Whether or not  it will dawn on the president that it is better for Mr. Odinga to be inside the tent pissing out depends almost entirely on whether or not he has honest advisors telling him the truth, as opposed to courtiers hell-bent on making a fast shilling. If for no reason, the president must bear in mind that three different presidents saw the wisdom of having Mr. Odinga in their governments.

New asshole same as old asshole

We are all guilty of seeing ourselves as smarter, better, more intelligent, cleverer, more decisive...than the guy we think is an idiot. We are twice as guilty when the foundation of our hubris are academic credentials that contain the words "first class", "distinction", "summa cum laude" and the like. But our heads swell to gargantuan proportions when we compare ourselves to the equally egoistic members of the political classes. It is human nature.

However the judgment of the masses, sometimes, where the instinct for self-promotion has been ruthlessly suppressed, is quite often informative. In the Kenya of the here and now, the masses are witness to the most witless Cabinet Secretary since the chef shuffled off to do local politics in his county. Our hapless maker of roadside declarations was touted by some of his most ardent boosters as a genius. He had a reckless tongue, for sure, but were relentlessly assured that once is hind parts sat on the seat of real power, he would reveal his true genius.

The truth, unsurprisingly, is that he has not covered himself in glory. He doesn't know anything about his ministry. He doesn't care to know anything about his ministry. What is worse is that he is incapable of the self-reflection necessary to know that he doesn't know anything. And so, in his customary brash manner, he has made a raft of policy pronouncements without caring whether or not he has the power, the intellect and technical skill needed to make the pronouncements.

He has opined on the status of various dockets out of his purview with the certainty of a religious zealot flying by the seat of his pants. It doesn't appear that he has consulted anyone. Not his technical staff (whom he says he has too many of that he doesn't need). Not his Cabinet colleagues. Not the government's chief legal advisor. Not even his former parliamentary colleagues. He is flying solo because, in his mind, he is the smartest man in the room because he told us he is the smartest man in the room.

His arrogance would have him believe that he is the first one to do what he is doing. He forgets that the last cabinet had a man with a similarly gargantuan ego who made a hash of his docket that it will take the better part of a decade to put right. Like our current tornado of shit, the previous guy would not listen to wise counsel. Would not consult technical experts. Would interfere in the mandates of others. And felt that it was his duty, at least once a week, to remind his colleagues and underlings that they were imbeciles. He is not facing the prospects of ten years of political inertia. Nether his previous colleagues nor the current powers-that-be are interested in giving him the time of day.

What distinguishes us from the people we loath, quite often, is our capacity for self-reflection and humility, the ability to admit when we are wrong, and the intellectual honesty to ask for help whenever we need it. We don't always do these things, but we do them often enough not to be reviled by our families, friends and co-workers. Our enfant terrible has spent a decade being told that he is the best of the best, being valorised for some of the most asinine political decisions he has ever made. Now that he has tasted real power, he is unlikely to have the humility to take a step back and ask, "Do I know what I'm supposed to do?"

Scapegoats and camouflage

If you were to go by the recent news stories, you would think that the greatest threat Kenya faces today is from the Alphabet Mafia. The Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transexuals and Queers, better know as the LGBTQ, are at the heart of a conversation that has roused ministers of religion and ministers of government, and all manner of characters in-between, to fulminate and froth at the mouth. The anti-LGBTQ tinder was lit by a spark set by the Supreme Court when it said that the freedom of association protected in Article 36 of the Constitution permitted the registration of a non-governmental body that seeks to address the discrimination that the members of the LGBTQ community face. That the Supreme Court very carefully added that it was not repealing section 162, 163 and 165 of the Penal Code seems to have passed the fulminators and mouth-frothers by.

The effect of the news-media attention on the "implications of the Supreme Court judgment" very neatly deflected from a much more present and on-going scourge: the sexual exploitation of women, girls and children at the hands of labour recruiters working in Kenya's tea farms. I don't know if you noticed how swiftly the BBC expose of the sexual exploitation of women, girls and children in tea farms fell off the front pages of the news tabloids and how the socialites masquerading as TV journalists stopped telling the story or asking the hard questions.

These things are not even a well-kept secret. If you have worked in or worked with or worked for a tea company in Kenya, then you know that exploitation is at the core of its operations and no exploitation is as devastating as sexual exploitation of the vulnerable. The managers knew. The brokers knew. The "international" buyers knew. We knew. But everyone, other than the victims, chose to pretend that unless it was said out loud, then it didn't exist, it hadn't happened, no one had suffered. But what added to the shards of glass piercing my wounded heart is the knowledge that every single minister of religion that had ever plied his or her trade in or around the tea farms knew this to be true and did nothing except to participate in the anti-LGBTQ pantomime being enacted as camouflage for that abominable scourge. God, my friend, hates the LGBTQ far more than he hates rapists.

Two things can be true at the same time: the Supreme Court did not legalise carnal acts against the order of nature, and women, girls and children are being systematically raped by powerful men in tea farms. But it is the latter that is, or should be, consequential. It is the latter that should arouse our outrage, rage, and violent anger.

Not even the ministers of religion have bothered to sit with the awful, terrible, terrifying reality of the devastation that sexual exploitation brings to an individual, a family, a community. The utter humiliation. The utter shame. The physical and psychological subjugation. The violence against bodies, spirits and psyches. None of this has pricked the conscience of God's messengers. But paint a rainbow anywhere in Kenya today and watch as a mob, hopped up on religious fervour, descends upon you with the intent of killing you, physically and stochastically, because you have dared to ignore God's abhorrence of the Alphabet Mafia.

The men, and it almost certainly all men, who perpetrated and oversaw the perpetration of gross violence will get away with their terrible crimes. They will retire to opulent wealth. They will harden their hearts and deafen their ears because they know that even God's messengers don't think they did anything wrong. God's messengers only care for one thing today: how much lucre is given by the devout to the ministry. Gold is God. Suffering is no longer of concern to God.

You won't save them

Unless you are in it, there is no way you can tell how you will be changed by being an insider in a government. Most of what you think you know about the mechanics of a government are quite often wrong, wrong-headed and uninformed. The day you become a member of that category of civil servants known as "State officers", your fortunes change for the better in dramatic, and disconcerting, fashion. You cease to be a member of the hoi polloi, and you become a member of the elite. Even if your office is a temporary one, your life is changed forever and unless you are a complete imbecile, you will never backslide into the category of Kenyan that lives hand-to-mouth. Ever.

In 2017, a young political hopeful in Meru campaigned in the poetry of the people he hoped to represent and won an electoral upset that inspired many young people across the country. It took a handsome gift from the head of state to put paid to his ambitions of being a peoples' representative. When he next floated across our view, he was waving a pistol around and firing in the air because the people he was meant to represent had a few hard words to have with him. The other young people who came after him have fallen faster from grace than one could say "woman representative".

One is whingeing that his net monthly salary of 91,000 is "too little". For a man paying a mortgage of over 500,000, that's a bit rich. His counterpart, a woman representative, spent two-thirds of her allowance for a constituency office paying close relatives' salaries. She seems to have missed the memo on nepotism in the public service.

The reason you are shocked about how these people are behaving is because you think that they have the strength of character to keep their head when they become part of the eating society. You only pick and choose what to eat and what to cast aside if you already have eaten too much and you can't eat anymore. These people, especially the more youthful ones, have never been exposed to this much money, power and privilege, especially the kind of money, power and privilege that comes without accountability or transparency. They are coddled and protected by a system that has become self-sustaining and self-protecting at a very high level.

They live in a cocoon of privilege that the outside world does not trouble. They don't have to, and they actively avoid, having to sit and talk to the people who have conferred them with the privilege, power and money they enjoy. It matters not whether they sit in legislative chambers or ministerial offices; once they occupy those positions, they and the people are divided. A wall is erected that separates them from the people, and the truth of their iniquitous existence. It is why, within a very short time, they lose whatever empathy they have for the man in the street and instead, assume the visage and character of ogres from fairy tale.

Indeed, when confronted with the horrors of their hypocrisy, the system they have joined educates them in the ways of gaslighting and blaming the victim. What you think they had promised, they say, is a figment of your febrile imagination. What you think they should do to ameliorate your straitened circumstances, is the road to communism. If things don't improve for the better, it is your fault.

You can't have known this unless you live and breath the air these people breathe. The day they suck in their first lungfuls of this rarefied atmosphere, save for those with the mental and psychological strength to know themselves, is the day you loose them. And once lost, they can never be saved. Ever.

Welcome to tragedy

When they went round the country seeking our vote, they promised the moon. Or, as is increasingly becoming apparent, the appeared to promise the moon. Now that the bill has fallen due, they have resorted to increasingly aggressive interpretations of what exactly they meant. This should not come a s a surprise. Ten years of Jubilationist two-faced-ness should have prepared us for extreme disappointment if not despair.

I don't much care for political manifestos or promises; they are largely meaningless documents that are rarely supported with any kind of deep thinking or planning. The last three presidential elections have seen teams of wonks pick their candidates and "advise" them on the best way to achieve one policy objective or the other. But even then, the wonks have played a secondary role, at best. Their job, it appears, has been to manufacture pithy one-liners and going-viral soundbites, rather than actually think through the intricate and intimate difficulty of making government do something meaningful.

I once deprecated the civil society types who fought and won elections or were appointed to the senior ranks of the national executive. I had observed that nearly, if not all, of them had turned out to be great disappointments. The promises many of them made to "combat corruption" turned out to be the snake oil they sold us in order for them to get heir hands in the proverbial cookie jar. Not one of them has ever emerged from the political arena smelling of roses. They have all been tainted.

The same is true of our favourite wonks. When they are on the outside with their noses pressed against the window, they make all the right noises about how they will craft sound government policies to solve seemingly intractable problems as diverse as chronic youth unemployment, rampant banditry in ASALs, implementation of new basic education curriculums, provision of universal health coverage, and development of large quantities of affordable housing for those on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

When they are eventually invited to the party, and they are shown the mess that was left behind by the previous team of promise-makers, and they finally realise that they will need at least ten years to just undo the last guys' messes, they almost always scale down, if not give up, their lofty ambitions and instead focus, body and soul, to winning the next general election. Governing and governance are shat into the deepest pit latrine they can find and, with their fingers still smelling of shit, they enter into a quasi-fugue state where they lecture us about how we misunderstood the promises they made. Some are quite good at the finger-wagging. Most are just crass.

What we see, what pisses us off, is the reckless way they adopt the airs, foibles, mistakes and white elephants of their predecessors, almost walls with less class or subtlety. In Kenya, the period between 2003 and 2005 was the most impactful to and for Kenyans. What Mwai Kibaki, Peter Anyang' Nyong'o, Martha Karua, Raila Odinga and Wycliffe Oparanya achieved was felt way into the 2010s What his successor did, the depths to which he sunk, will reveberate in infamy for decades. That the new kids on the block have ignored the lessons of the excesses of the last guy is tragic.

Seriously difficult decisions need to be made. We know it. They know it. Whether or not the decisions will be made appears to be foresworn, for now, as we are treated to theatres of the absurd: random senators waging war with polygamous spouses; random TikTok celebrities being appointed to policy-making committees; random shirtless "spokesmen of the youth" getting arrested for some new asinine demonstration; over-the-hill politicians whingeing about unopened servers; and so on and so forth. History repeats, first as farce and then as tragedy. Welcome to the tragedy.

The fast-closing window for change

When one listens to some of the Cabinet Secretaries, one may be mistaken for thinking that new institutions are being established to undertake heretofore functions that have never been performed by Government. In one remarkable screed in the Daily Nation tabloid, there are these astonishing paragraphs:

The Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM) in a communique to its members on Friday said it would push for talks with the government regarding its plans to set up the Kenya National Trading Corporation (KNTC).

KNTC will be funded by Afreximbank and will enable the company to guarantee sufficient importation of key commodities including grains, processed edible oils and fertilizers.

Had the various editors who allowed the story to be published checked, they would have discovered that the Kenya National Trading Corporation, which is a State Corporation in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Livestock Development, was incorporated in 1965. It is mandated to act as a procurement agent for the Government and to participate in the promotion of wholesale and retail trade in order to strengthen the supply chain of essential products. But the Daily Nation tabloid would have you believe, based on statements by the Cabinet Secretary, that a new KNTC is being established and that it will be financed by the African Export-Import Bank (Afriexim Bank). (The less said about the appalling journalistic standards of Kenya's tabloids, the better.)

These kinds of missteps now characterise a large swathe of the Cabinet. The Cabinet Secretary for Health, for example, appears unaware of long-standing public health policies regarding sexual and reproductive health especially among teenagers. The ball had been set rolling with the initial announcements by the Deputy President regarding the re-introduction of the shamba system (Plantation Establishment for Livelihood Improvement Scheme) without taking into account the reasons why the scheme had failed or what the current policies in agriculture and forestry, under two separate ministries, entailed.

The Cabinet Secretary for Interior and national Administration, and his counterpart in the Defence Ministry, jumped the gun regarding the deployment of the Kenya Defence Forces in "bandit-prone areas" to quell "cattle-rustling". The obligation to seek the approval of Parliament appears to have caught them by surprise they worked overtime to find constitutional and legal justifications for why such approval was not required. They persuaded few.

Governing, at the best of times, is difficult. It is doubly so when one is dealing with a fractious political coalition wedded to patronage and graft. But it is nigh on impossible to do when you are faced with drought and famine, violent lawlessness in remote regions, an underperforming economy that is sluggish after sharp pandemic downturns, a demographic bulge that is plagued with chronic underemployment and unemployment, and a balance of payments scenario that has no positive outlook for at least five to ten years. So it needs a deft hand to ensure that the messaging by members of the Cabinet is consistent and somewhat intelligent.

No magic wand will fix the structural defects of government. All one can do is make incremental improvements in the hope that his programmes will survive political challenge, parliamentary scrutiny and public criticism. Scarce funds will have to be allocated and relocated in order to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number in the shortest time possible. In order to achieve this, the national political leadership cannot be competing with each other to make ever more reckless stamens about their dockets, leave alone others' dockets. It is instructive, for example, that they are no longer singing the praises of weekly Cabinet meetings, because the current policy incoherence is an indictment of the worth of those meetings.

The window to make meaningful changes from how the Jubilation governed is fast closing. If the new regime is not careful, it will carry over the worst instincts from the former Government, including a penchant for public relations gimmickry to camouflage poor decision-making and inconsistent implementation of public policies.

It's time for us to quit Mr Odinga

There is a twinge of grief when we witness a towering man lose his so way very publicly. What we are witnessing with Mr Raila Odinga, Prime Minister, Doyen of the Opposition, indefatigable liberation fighter, political colossus and bugbear of presidents and governments, is saddening. In the immediate aftermath of the 2022 presidential election, there was a bit of public sympathy for his fifth loss. That sympathy has ebbed away since the shambolic way he prosecuted the presidential election petition. His latest gambit, admitting to have paid foreigners to compromise the IEBC computer systems in search of proof to satisfy his needs, might very well be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back.

It is one thing to refuse to accept the results of the election or the judgment of the Supreme Court. One can refuse to accept both outcomes. One might even deny the legitimacy of both outcomes. One might even mount a blistering attack in the court of public opinion against both outcomes. But in a modern democracy, one that was hard fought, it might not be in the public interest to undertake a sustained siege against the foundations of the constitutional framework a people have adopted for themselves.

What Mr Odinga and, to a large extent, what his acolytes and mouthpieces have done, is to not just deny the legitimacy of a presidential election and presidential election petition judgment, they deny the legitimacy of institutions of state that they themselves had attempted to undermine in nefarious ways. Mr Odinga appears oblivious to his efforts to undermine the presidential election, relying, as he did, on the active connivance of Sate officers who had no business campaigning for him or using public resources to do so. For him to turn around and declare that it is his electorally successful rival who misused public resources and compromised the election commission and Supreme Court, is a bit rich.

This is not to say tax the way the president is behaving is kosher. Far from it. But to expect him to not take steps to forestall a political crisis in his government is naive. That Mr Odinga and his colleagues int he minority are incapable of formulating a coherent strategy to counteract the president's overtures, to prevent the total subsuming of the legislature to the diktats of the presidency, is an indictment of Mr Odinga and his colleagues rather than proof of the president's political deviousness. Mr Odinga is so wedded to the idea that he could still be president that he has thrown all political caution to the winds and is now admitting to criminal conspiracies that in a mature democracy would have had him answering difficult questions before a magistrate.

Mr Odinga, by his behaviour, extends the hangover over the Westminster Model we abandoned over twelve years ago. It is because of his nuttiness that the idea of an office of the "Leader of the Official Opposition" is proceeding ahead in the National Assembly. Kenya's constitutional framework is no longer about the ruling party and the official opposition; it is about checks and balances among the three main arms of government: parliament, the national executive and the judiciary, with all of them being kept honest by constitutional commissions and independent offices.

But Mr Odinga is determined to paint the majority party int he colours of the ruling party if only so that he can continue to paint himself in the colours of an opposition politician. This mentality prevents parliament from playing its proper role of oversight, especially of the national executive, instead of becoming the handmaiden to the president, regardless of the fitness of the president's policies. In my opinion, the reason why the government has failed to formulate an effective famine response framework is because of Mr Odinga's intransigent grip on his identity as an opposition politician. Because of him, parliamentarians define themselves along the same line: ruling party versus opposition. And as a result, not a single member of the majority party has raised any significant query against the famine response by the national executive, leading to prolonged suffering across large swathes of the Northern Frontier.

It is time for us to quit Mr Odinga of only so that we can build the government we actually agreed to in the Constitution. The longer that he continues to hold us back, the longer we will be unable to deploy the checks and balances needed to hold presidents, their cabinets and their state agencies to accounts for their policies, programmes and projects. So long as Mr Odinga's mentality continues to undermine the role of parliament, harebrained white elephants like the Nairobi Expressway will continue to impoverish the nation.

Wash-rinse-repeat. Sigh.

It is plain as the nose on your face: Kenya's politicians are incapable of quitting bad habits. The wash-rinse-repeat instinct is strong in them. Take, for example, the instinct to investigate and persecute former presidents. When Mwai Kibaki finally assumed office as The Third, some of the more zealous members of his Cabinet initiated the process of evicting Daniel Moi from Kabarnet Gardens, ostensibly because the property was "owned by the government" and, as a former government official, President Moi was not entitled to continue living there. President Kibaki, in his characteristically wise way, instead directed the Commissioner of Lands and Minister of Lands to proceed with haste to process and issue a title deed to the property in President Moi's name, and that was the end of that rubbish.

It seems that President Ruto's more excitable acolytes (with an unusual assist from the more semi-literate members of the putative minority party) have not taken any lessons from the proceedings of 2003. They are, with ill-grace, determined to sicc the police, the taxman, anticorruption authorities and public prosecutors on his predecessor, and they are determined to get their way no matter how churlish, small-minded and petty it makes them look. They are replaying the destabilising politics of 2003 and they don't care how it undermines the President's agenda or detracts from the necessary political work needed for the President's agenda to succeed.

The 2022 general election, especially the presidential election, was hard-fought. The winner prevailed despite him and his loyal lieutenants being the targets of state agencies, including the police and taxman. Instead of consolidating the president's victory, as had appeared to be the case in the first few weeks after the Supreme Court judgment, they have now turned their attention to schemes that do little to focus the mind on the president's agenda. Instead of behaving as a victorious political agglomeration, they are conducting themselves as if they are still intimidated by the leaders of the minority party, taking every public event by the leaders of the minority party as a mortal threat to their political survival. Consequently, they have done little to develop innovative policies that are needed to see through their grand ambitions.

Maybe I have it wrong. Maybe the public ill-will is a careful camouflage of nefarious schemes. Maybe they are throwing up enough smoke to distract us from the five-fingered discounts they are helping themselves to from the public purse. Who knows? But if they want to be taken seriously, f they want their agenda to be taken seriously, then they should do less ex-president baiting, and more agenda-setting. But, going with he current antics, it is unlikely that they will rouse themselves to govern or even govern effectively.

Prohibition is not the answer

The deputy president, in another of his brand of executive pronouncements, has directed county governments and administrative officers of the national government to “eradicate alcoholism” among the youth by, among other things, only permitting the issuance of a single liquor license “per town”. The reason for the draconian decree is that the youth are being destroyed by alcohol and drugs. The logic of the decree is that if the bars are shut down, the youth will not have access to alcohol (or drugs), and therefore, they will be saved from destruction.

It’s a simplistic argument and it is, in my opinion, uninformed. It is true that the prevalence of alcoholism among young people is very high. As is drug taking. But it does not follow that the reason why young people are becoming alcohol and drug addicts is because of the prevalence of bars. Correlation is not causation.

There are many reasons why alcoholism is affecting more and more younger people. One reason may be easier access to alcohol. In my opinion, there are several other reasons: the liquor licensing regime contemplated in the Mututho Laws has been observed more in the breach. There are more licensed premises where alcohol is served in residential areas than there are playing grounds. There are more bars within 100 metres of basic education institutions than there are libraries or book banks. There are more social media influencers promoting alcoholic beverages than there are those promoting sporting events or book fairs. In short, planning regulations have been ignored, the rule that bars should not be licensed near schools has been violated, and the ban on advertising has been subverted through social media paid promotions by non-traditional advertisers. Closing down bars is not the silver bullet that the deputy president thinks it is.

The solution that the deputy president proposes will not eradicate alcoholism; what it will do, especially if it is enforced the way he wants it to be enforced, will be to re-establish the primacy of the provincial administration that was the bane of this nation since the day it was created by the colonial government. It will give police and administrative officers free license to harass law-abiding Kenyans and lead to new ways of violating the rights and fundamental freedoms of restive, unemployed, despondent young people.

One of the mistakes that Uhuru Kenyatta made was to resort to simple, and often violently draconian, solutions for complex problems, and using the security services to implement those solutions. He didn’t appear to be interested in the hard work needed to analyse problems, and promote multi-pronged solutions, as all socio-economic problems demand. This is a mistake that the new regime seems partial to repeating. It is as if the mistakes of the past 12 years have been erased from our collective memory, and we are hell-bent in doing them over again, in the same way, with the same tools, and the same outcomes.

If, for example, we acknowledge that by the time a young person has become an alcoholic and drug addict, merely shutting down the local bar will not stop him from getting his fix. It impossible that the much-maligned “illicit brews” sector is about to enjoy a resurgence. Which will lead to tax evasion and other administrative wrongs. Which will lead to petty and property crimes. Which will eventually lead to violent crime. Which will lead to the resurgence of protection rackets by the likes of the Mungiki. And eventually, policemen will get in on the lucre that the criminal networks will have re-established. The one-bar-per-town, a bastardised version of the USA’s Prohibition Era, will end in disaster.

Farce and tragedy

We are living the same script. A presidential election is held, contested, adjudicated, declared and a president is sworn in. The losing candidate, The Losing Candidate, refuses to accept the result and embarks on a mourning spanning years to undermine the legitimacy of the presidential election; the president counters by making increasingly unwise declarations. Eventually the political rivals strike a bargain “to cool political temperatures” and patently unconstitutional schemes are hatched that may, or may not, be scuttled by an increasingly assertive judiciary.

2023 is no different from 2017 which was a rehash of 2013 and 2008. The situation is exacerbated by a political class that is bereft of vision, incapable of seeing beyond its collective nose, held hostage with the need to win the next election at all costs, and exhibiting all the attributes of the intellectually inferior and politically dwarfish.

The president and political leader of the majority party and the political leader of the minority party (not to be confused with the minority and majority leaders in parliament) both suffer from a lack of a clear, defining political vision, because the political vehicles they own and control are not founded on any clear political ideologies that inspire their members to articulate a vision of this country that transcend petty parochial sensitivities. They cover themselves with the language of political discourse, but if you rub off the thin layer of sophistication, what you reveal is a barren, desiccated and arid wasteland of dead single-party norms and dear leader vibes.

The consequences are dire. Had either of them the ability to clearly articulate a unified vision of what Kenya is, what it aspires to be, and what to can be, you would not have, five months after the Supreme Court declared with finality, morose politicians swinging wildly at the dead horse of the presidential election resuscitate. You would have them speaking with authority that, for example, competence based curricula are a death knell of young Kenyans’ futures; that the sale of the national family silver to johnny-come-latelies is nothing more than a 1990s desire to transfer state assets to well-connected political operatives and not to build national economic and industrial champions; that so long as thieves are responsible for public health policy, the dream of universal health care will never come to pass; and so on and so forth.

We know that they lack a coherent vision because their mouthpieces and surrogates keep repeating the same moribund political ideas; keep rehashing conspiracy theories that have been rejected by the highest court of the land; propose scatterbrained economic revival programmes that are thinly veiled schemes to swindle the state of billions of shillings. Anyone who takes an accused attempted murderer seriously in matters of truth, justice or reconciliation, and permits that person to speak for him, undermines the legitimacy of his political claims. Anyone who promises probity in word and deed but appoints men and women with known doubtful antecedents, desecrates any trust he may have garnered from the voting citizenry.

We have seen this movie before. They say that history repeats itself, first as farce and then as tragedy. The farcical bit ended with the interment of the BBI scheme. The tragedy, bar a radical change of course, is unfolding right before our eyes.

Without trust, Mr Odinga is going nowhere

Raila Amolo Odinga is a colossus. It is immaterial that some of us think that he is over the hill, past his prime. He remains the most consequential politician and political leader this country hs experienced since his late father, Jaramogi, passed away. One can no longer wish away Mr Odinga as one could stop breathing. We can count on one hand the politicians and political leaders who have a made a genuine difference in Kenya, whether for good or for bad, and that list shall be incomplete if it does not have Mr Odinga on it.

The Supreme Court, after weighing the evidence adduced before it, determined that William Ruto was duly elected as the fifth president of Kenya. The road to this determination is not a tortuous one. Mr Odinga shook hands with Uhuru Kenyatta and buried the hatchet of the 2017 presidential election, which Mr Odinga refused to accept. Mr Kenyatta thereafter sidelined Mr Ruto, his deputy president, and embarked on a harebrained scheme to change the constitution. Mr Ruto joined hands with disgruntled Mt Kenya politicians which sustained him through four years of unfortunate treatment at the hands of his principal. When the presidential election was held, Mr Odinga was treated as the Government because of the support he received from Uhuru Kenyatta and his officials, and Mr Ruto, the sitting deputy president, was treated as the underdog, a role he played up all through.

It is common knowledge that Mr Ruto ran a well-organised presidential campaign; the discipline in his ranks was remarkable. Mr Odinga, on the other hand, never truly appeared to be the captain of his ship. First, it took him and Mr Kenyatta wasted weeks to get Mr Kalonzo Musyoka onside. Thereafter, it was never clear who was the one in charge: Mr Kenyatta or Mr Odinga. Rumours continue to swirl, that even on the day of the presidential election, Mr Odinga's team did not have a unified list of poll station observers. Indeed, things were so bad that Ms Martha Karua, Mr Odinga's running mate, could not even muster a good showing in her Gichugu, Kirinyaga, constituency. Mr Odinga alleges that rather than poor preparation and execution of plans on election day, it is Mr Ruto's campaign that subverted the will of the people by interfering with election processes, particularly the electronic transmission and tallying system, stealing votes from Mr Odinga and allocating them to Mr Ruto. The proof that Mr Odinga adduced before the Supreme Court was dismissed as mere "hot air". He has, since the judgment, maintained the righteousness of his claims and he seems, today, to have found a whistleblower willing to back his allegations.

Wahenga husema, "You will know them by the company they keep". Mr Odinga keeps some very dubious company. The positions they have adopted, and the actions they have undertaken, ostensibly in his name, have had negative externalities, as the economists say. They alienated voters by their braggadocio. They strutted around with their noses in their air safe in the knowledge that the "system", for once, was on their side. They took the voters for granted and as a result, peppered their pronouncements and announcements with condescending and pejorative language that, in effect, told us to know our place, not question the dubious use of state resources for their benefit, or the secretive relationships among and between them. While many of us are disappointed that Mr Odinga was not elected, very few of us actually sympathise with his plight, never mind the crowds that still flock to his rallies.

Mr Odinga is a colossus. But that is meaningless if he surrounds himself with political and intellectual pygmies, places his trust in slothful chancers and scallywags, and embarks on change-the-constitution adventures filled with evil designs for the people he seeks to govern. It may very well turn out that the whistleblower has spoken the truth and that his evidence is verifiable. But it doesn't matter so long as Mr Odinga's trust deficit with the vast majority of Kenyas remains so wide. Without us, the people, his claims are not worth more than a bucket of warm spit.

Radio sex and Italian leather shoes

The straw that broke this camel’s back came on a dreary morning riding a Double M to work and listening to Maina and King’ang’i in the Morning. It had rained the night before and, as was usual then, the sewers along Landhies Road were blocked and the sewerage was flowing out in the open. The stench was terrible. But what caught me out, beyond the indignity of my fellowman playing hop-skip-and-jump over puddles of sewerage, was the cackling by the two radio personalities at the expense of the poor people who suffered these indignities. It was stark that the morning radio shows, in addition to serving salacious and risqué fare, had little empathy for those they considered beneath them and held the unwashed masses in utter contempt.

While I disagreed with Joe Aketch’s opposition to the sale of Muthurwa Estate to private developers for the construction of new social housing, I understood it. As a councillor in City Hall, he had seen first hand how promises for the betterment of the poor were never kept, they were often dispossessed in the name of redevelopment and slum upgrading, and no one could take the promises of the movers and shakers at face value without establishing trust through cast-iron-guarantees of benefits to project-affected persons. For this reason, on the day that Maina and King’ang’i chose to mock and belittle the poor of Muthurwa, the repairs and rehabilitation of the sewer and drainage system in the area had been ignored for years. Not much has changed in 2023.

The reason I’m banging on about Maina and King’ang’i has something to do with a discussion I had last night on Twitter. I suggested that (especially for radio listeners) we have been programmed to listen more to radio shows heavy on sex and salaciousness than educational or informative fare, like Seeds of Gold (a series published in a weekend newspaper and broadcast on TV). Sex, and our version of political commentary, sell more than any programme designed to inform and educate.

I had, when I was a student in India, the benefit of WorldSpace satellite radio, through which I listened to lots of USA radio programming, particularly NPR. When I came home, the kind of on-air commentary that I enjoyed on NPR was lacking. I think, though my memory may fail me, that Granton Samboja had an evening radio show where he interviewed aspiring parliamentarians in 2007. But, for the most part, radio was dominated by low-brow sex-heavy broadcasts, sprinkled with low-brow political commentary that was long on speculation and short on any substantive discussions of things that affected us.

My observation is that the low-brow end of the entertain-inform-educate troika attracts advertising shillings. These kinds of shows are easy to produce and easy to sponsor. On the other hand, Seeds of God, for example, requires more resources, more time, more expertise. They cost more to produce. They are not popular topics (like sex and politics). They do not attract many advertisers. Media companies will promote the low-brow programmes and only do the the bare minimum to bring Seeds of Gold to a wider audience. In my opinion, we have been programmed to prefer the Maina and King’ang’i programme to Seeds of Gold. 

This isn’t to say that we don’t actively seek and listen to Maina and King’ang’i. Given the paucity of shows like Seeds of Gold, the choice we are given is merely different varieties of Maina and King’ang’i. It is not really a choice. The consequences are stark. Even among the people who should know better, little of substance is published, aired or broadcast to a wider audience. One must actively join different platforms, and actively search for informative and educational information, if one is to “better oneself”. Our national IQ is slowly slipping. It is how we end up with parliamentarians who think that being a Big Boy is being able to buy five thousand dollar Italian leather shoes. Sex on radio in the morning is how we ended up, to a large extent, being governed by semi-literate windbags in the Age of Information.

New nawab same as old nawab

The new-ish Government has announced that it it is going to build in 6 months an “ultramodern stadium” in Embu where the national celebrations for Madaraka Day shall be held. In order to make sure that the project is a success, it has placed the Principal Secretary in the Interior ministry in charge. The Ministry in charge of internal security - policing and intelligence - rather than the Sports ministry or even the Culture ministry is responsible for building a stadium. The more things change…

Kenya’s officialdom has learnt no lessons form the insertion of policemen, soldiers and intelligence officers in overtly civilian spaces. The secrecy that attends national defence and national security questions is now part and parcel of a vast swathe of purely civilian matters, contrary to the tenets of Article 10 and Article 232 of the Constitution regarding transparency and accountability. Indeed, not even a passing acquaintance with “the participation of the people” can be claimed when it comes to decisions made by members of the disciplined services; theirs is to do or die, not to wonder why.

Presidents Kenyatta the Elder, Moi, Kibaki and Kenyatta the Younger relied on their authority as commanders-in-chief to issue decrees that would and could not be countermanded or undermined by the members of the securocracy that they commanded. Their orders were almost always carried out without question. As a result, Kenyans were frequently harmed, injured, lied to, robbed and cheated in the guise of “national development”. Even in cases where such projects “succeeded”, it almost always emerged that we had overpaid for white elephants that had limited national or even local utility and whose costs lingered long after the projects had inevitably collapsed. Repeating the mistakes of past presidencies now seems to be a feature of the modern Kenyan presidency, not a bug.

Back in the day, the Public Works Department built things. It procured the supplies, deployed its engineers, and built things. It eventually succumbed to the sclerosis of corruption and Kenya established a new-ish procurement legislative framework, that now consists of the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act, the Public Private Partnerships Act, and the Public Finance Management Act. Boring shit, really. But you need to learn about this boring shit, especially about key phrases like “request for proposals”, “award of tender”, “procuring entity”, “financial close” and similar connected phrases that constitute the procurement of an “ultramodern stadium”. Even if you are not starting with a clean slate, merely prequalifying suppliers for the refurbishment and upgrading of the Embu stadium is not something that can be accomplished in 5 months, unless corners are cut, procedures are elided, mistakes are made, and scarce public funds go walkabout.

Had they said they were taking steps to spruce up the existing facility so that, for one day in 2023 it would be the centre of national attention, they could just justify an outlay that would run into the hundreds of millions of shillings. But, promising the impossible, and finding dodgy ways to justify things like “single-source procurement” and “emergency procurement”, only serves to entrench in the minds of those who had given the Government the benefit of the doubt, that the new nawabs were the same as the old nawabs and that it is Kenyans who shall end up the poorer for it.

Welcome to 2023

It pays to pay attention to what politicians do and say, even as it is increasingly exhausting to do so. Many of the decisions made by government officials are affected by what elected politicians do or say, decisions that affect our day-to-day lives in large and small ways. Take the miffed bad-tempered reactions by the many, many men in the Meru county assembly for example. One worthy was so offended by the Meru Governor's vindication by the Senate that he declared on public television that he was no longer available to listen, or deal with, the complaints from his constituents. Instead, he sniffily announced, the aggrieved residents of the county should take their troubles to the Governor as he and his colleagues would only be available for weddings, funerals and birthdays.

This kind of performative stupidity affects the Government, and the governed, in profound ways. In Nairobi, a Nyeri senator has threatened to bring a motion of impeachment against the Nairobi Governor because the Governor has disrespected the Deputy President and "businessman from Mt Kenya region". Nairobi is plagued by many problems, one of which is the seemingly law-unto-itself behaviour of the matatu industry. Nairobi's Governor has made proposals on how to deal with some of the problems caused by the matatu industry. The Deputy President has attempted to intervene in the matter, invoking the claim that it will adversely affect business people from Mt Kenya region. The Nairobi Governor has, quite rightly, told him to mind his own national business and leave the county government to its rightful leadership. The Nyeri senator, feigning umbrage and pique, has chimed in with his two cents and acted like the senatorial toddler he is by threatening impeachment for the governor who is doing the job for which he was elected.

When Makueni county assembly members attempted to intimidate Governor Kivutha Kibwana, he stood his ground, and asked for the county government to be dissolved. The crisis was only resolved when the national government intervened. The voters sent all the members oof the assembly, save one, home at the next general election. It would behoove the nutters in Peru and Nyeri to take heed of their power and not allow the kinds of wasteful shenanigans engaged in by their elected representatives.

We enter 2023 faced with serious economic challenges that require sobriety and intelligence to resolve. The challenges will take longer to address if elected representatives are stupidly flexing their non-existent legislative muscles to bully and intimidate state officials charged with making life-altering decisions regarding the challenges. Tabloids like the Daily Nation and the Standard do not help by amplifying asinine political contests that do legislative and administrative harm instead of doing what the first drafters of history are supposed to do: hold the Government to account by telling truth to power.

But because of the domestic economic troubles many of us face, the lack of a credible Fourth Estate, the amplification of salacious spectacle over reasoned examination of state power, we are hard-pressed to pay attention to what needs paying attention to. School curricula, and the economic interests that favour one curriculum design over all others, are examined only by committed educationists and whose voices are smothered and suppressed. Electricity policy is a murky place where secret contracts with shady off-shore companies and inexplicable tax policies ensure that no Kenyan home is quite certain whether the electricity they are paying for isn't actually some form of poverty-inducing programme designed to keep them in penury for all eternity. Organised labour continues to suffer from sclerotic union leadership, where geriatrics gallivant to international bacchanalias and abandon any form of collective action to beef up paycheques for their members. The lunacies of the Meru county assembly members, and the news media amplification of those lunacies, are signs of coming terrible times for Kenyans. Something needs to give before we are overwhelmed and resort to extreme measures to force changes at the top.

We, the people...

Some of us have very specific ideas about how our Government should be run, ideas that, when given the opportunity, we share with the world in sometimes insistently strident tones. Some of us have been christened by the news media and punditocracy as "governance experts" and we bring our views to the masses through media interviews and commentary panels. But despite all the expertise we share with the world on the inner workings of the Government, public service, parliament and county assemblies, we seem to have ignored the most important stakeholder: ourselves.

The shenanigans in the Meru County Government and the shambolic way in which public sanitation is managed in Nairobi City County offer a window into the reasons why these failures have come to pass. First, to Gov. Kawira Mwangaza, her musician husband, and the dodgy grounds for her impeachment by the members of the Meru County Assembly. From the news reports, Gov. Mwangaza, a minister of faith and owner of a TV station, used her faith ministry and TV station to gain popularity and, at the 2022 general election, defeated Kiraitu Murungi to become Meru's third Governor. She did this as an independent candidate no less.

She appointed her husband to a non-remunerative county government position soon after. He attended County Executive Committee meetings where he appears to have made robust interventions. He participated in Meru County Government public events, as an entertainer, at the behest of the Governor. He has made public statements regarding county government matters that have affected the relationship between the Governor and the county assembly. This has created a schism between the two offices, and led to the Governor's impeachment. In this drama, the views of the residents of Meru County have not been solicited and if they had any views at all, only the sensational and salacious parts have been shared by the news media.

All in all, it appears as if Gov. Mwangaza's claim to fame was her Christian ministry and TV station. She had parlayed both into election, first as Woam Representative and thereafter as Governor. She appears to have done little of renown in terms of governance as a Woman Representative and, if the MCAs have their way, she won't get the chance to do anything as governor, and the residents of Meru will carry on as if this kind of situation is normal.

Nairobi offers a different kind of dysfunction. Four successive governors have failed to solve the solid waste management problem. Dr. Evans Kidero, despite his apparent academic and managerial credentials, was an abject failure. His promises went unmet. So too were Mr. Mike Sonko and his successor Ms. Anne Kananu. Gov. Johnson Sakaja seems to be well on his way to abject failure on that front as well. The way the national executive is determined to undercut his authority will not help matters.

Just like in Gov. Mwangaza's case, Gov. Sakaja did not distinguish himself in the Senate during the ten years that he was a member. His popularity as a talking head on TV notwithstanding and some Bills that were enacted into law, he proved to be just as lacklustre as the majority of his fellow-parliamentarians, incapable of articulating the problems that plagued the nation's Capital or propose any lasting solutions beyond throwing good money after bad. No wonder the national executive sees no reason to refer to him when appointing task forces to solve the county's problems.

Gov. Sakaja came close to centring the residents of Nairobi in his thinking when he declared a war on noise, but the way he has ignored the law, the administrative process and the affected bar owners tells me that he thinks that he is the incarnation of Mussolini and he only need bark for everyone to cower and obey. He will fail in his endeavours because he will make compromises to protect the city's revenue base and give a free pass to religious places, especially Christian churches. His failures, though, will be starkly demonstrated as the mountains of garbage that Kidero, Sonko and Kananu (and not to forget the hapless Gen. Bad of the unwanted, unnecessary Nairobi Metropolitan Services) failed to shift.

We are not absolved or blameless. We make excuses for why we are not engaged in the civic matters of our counties. We shift responsibility for our civic failures to others. We only engage in political activity in the narrowest possible way: political party nominations (in political parties we are not members of) and general elections (which he have a so-so faith in). We don't nominate people we think we need; we nominate (and elect) people who come from our "communities". And so legislative and administrative failures like Mr. Sakaja and Ms. Mwangaza, whose fame is their only credential, end up in suzerainty over us. And we wonder why we don't have all-day piped water or why garbage continues to choke our public drains and block our public thoroughfares.

Time to put them out to pasture

The President cannot initiate Constitutional amendments or changes through the popular initiative under Article 257 of the Constitution. - [2022] KESC 8 (KLR)

The bulk of legislative proposals considered and enacted by Parliament are made by the national executive. It is the rare private member's Bill that is enacted by Parliament and assented to by the President. This is to say that for the most part, the President can send a legislative proposal to Parliament and Parliament, in its wisdom as the representation of the legislative will of the people, can enact it or reject it. Therefore, the President can initiate an amendment to the Constitution of Kenya. What he can't do, and the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court were adamant on this point, is to initiate Constitutional amendments by popular initiative.

It is important to remember one other thing: an amendment to the Constitution by popular initiative does not necessarily mean that a referendum must be conducted on the amendment. A referendum must be conducted if the amendment affects any of the issues found in Article 255. The question of whether or not a referendum is warranted is independent of whether the amendment was by parliamentary or by popular initiative.

As to the question of the "office of the leader of the official opposition", a referendum is definitely warranted. Going by how the Azimio One Kenya Alliance described the functions of the proposed office, it is clear that the proposed amendment falls squarely within the ambit of Article 255 ("the functions of Parliament") and on that basis alone, whether the proposals is a parliamentary one or a popular one, a referendum is necessary for the amendment to be adopted by the people.

Regardless of who brings the amendment process to life, we are being manipulated onto thinking that the amendment is not a bad one. The popular discourse regarding the proposal is that it is a new form of handshake between the new administration and the putative opposition, and it is almost always framed in those terms. The Minority Party in Parliament is not treated as part of Parliament but an Opposition Party in the Westminster style of parliamentary government. It is not. It hasn't been since 2013. But you wouldn't know it going by how the 11th and 12th Parliaments behaved with Parliamentary Parties taking their political differences to such dysfunctional depths that Parliament never effectively played its oversight role over the national executive. In short, Parliament shirked its role and the Jubilee administration got away with all manner of dodgy things.

If we allow the office of the leader of the official opposition to be established along the lines proposed by Azimio, it is almost certain to be the last nail in the coffin of parliamentary oversight and we can kiss whatever restraints there were on the national executive goodbye. First, oversight is not an individual endeavour but an institutional one. A single "office" is incapable of wielding the kind of collective power that Parliament, and parliamentary committees, can. Secondly, and more crucially, it absolves Parliament from the responsibility of lax oversight; parliamentarians can pass the buck and say, "Hey, the Leader of the Official Opposition didn't do this, that or the other" and they can play footsie with the executive to their hearts' content. If the office is established, it is the people who will come out the poorer for it.

Mr. Odinga, and his acolytes including Prof. Makau Mutua, have had a good innings at the hustings but they are more likely today to advance political ideas that are twenty years out of date, like the cult of personality they insist on building around Mr. Odinga. Mr. Odinga's ODM is no longer capable of fresh ideas; listening to the younger members of the party leadership (like Sen. Sifuna and Hon. Ongili), one harkens back to the Kanu of the late 1970s with the likes of Kihika Kimani and Kariuki Chotara springing readily to mind who were determined to sustain a cult of personality around Jomo Kenyatta even though by 1975 it was clear he was over the hill and clinging on to power by the skin of his teeth. It is time to put Mr. Odinga, Prof. Makau and their generation of the Old Guard of the Second Liberation out to pasture, and bury moribund and retrogressive ideas like the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition in the deepest pit we can find.

Save the children. Or die.

It is ingrained in us to seek the intervention of the supernatural and, thereby, received divine favours. We propitiate the gods (and the universe) by making sacrifices to them in the hopes that they will be kind to us and grant us our deepest desires. Some of our sacrifices are deeply personal, while other are in the far of property. The more desperate we become, the bigger the sacrifice. This belief has led to great crimes.

I can't remember which general election brought to the limelight the serial murder of albinos but I remember how terrifying it was for them as a category of people, Kenyan and foreign. The killings were so widespread that our sisters and brothers in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were not spared. All this just so a man could win an election, something he considered to be a matter of life or death. After he lost, as many of them did, he fomented violence in his community, leading to further bloodshed, only this time more indiscriminate.

Kenya has had a long history of human sacrifices for wealth or political power. Those of us who grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s can remember the rumours of a transport company owner whose Mombasa-Nairobi buses would have a string of accidents that resulted in mass casualties and that the deaths were human sacrifices to satisfy the bloodlust of the majini that made him fabulously wealthy. So it is with profound sadness that we are now told a family in Kisii has made a human sacrifice of a husband and the eyes of their three-years' old child so that the son and the mother can become rich. Our capacity for cruelty camouflaged as mysticism knows no bounds.

This faith in the supernatural has little to do with the level of education or social class or political and economic power. A successful political candidate from western kenya was convicted by an election court for, among other things, relying on witchcraft to win re-election. It seems, though, that the wider poverty spreads in kenya, the more people turn to supernatural interventions in order to get ahead. In Kisii, for example, the past decade has witnessed scores of widows being branded witches by their families, and murdered, and the properties they inherited from their husbands shared among their survivors. And now, children, without the ability to defend themselves or understand the risks their families pose, have become targets.

More generally too, children have become the targets of cruelty, in the home and at school, and little seems to be done to stem the tide of violence directed at them. I remember the lengths to which parents and alumni went to protect the "reputation" of a church-sponsored school located along Waiyaki Way when it covered up the death of a pupil at the hands of his classmate. Or the callous way the Cabinet Secretary for Education refused to address the systemic failures that led to the deaths of scores of schoolgirls in a dormitory fire.

As a people, as communities, as a nation, we seem impervious to the pain our neglect and violence has wrought on the most vulnerable among us. So long as we are securing the bag, you and yours are on your own, and our children had best learn fast how to fend off the predators and killers who would seek to shed their blood for a fistful of shillings. What we are doing is sowing the seeds of our own destruction, destruction that will come at the hands of those we have abused, misused and defiled, and made stones of their hearts. If we don't save our children, they will be the death of us.

Punda amechoka

On the 27th August of 2010, after more than twenty years of agitation, state-sponsored violence, political chicanery and constitutional lawfare, Kenya promulgated a new constitution. From the Ufungamano House Initiative, to the Ghai Commission to the Committee of Experts, Kenyans were determined to remake the constitutional framework to recognise and respect the will of the people. It was not our wish to repackage an avaricious political class with new titles and new offices. It is for this reason that we must acknowledge the tragic out-of-time-ness of Raila Odinga's determined push for political relevance by seeking a new government sinecure in the form of Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition courtesy of a BBI-like constitutional amendment.

Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga attempted to pull the wool over Kenyans' eyes with the Building Bridges Initiative that suffered catastrophic blows from the Judiciary. Even with the weak-toast face-saving by the Supreme Court, BBI was not supported, could not be supported, by the people. Its proposals should have received far better critical review, but because of the underhanded way that the entire enterprise was undertaken, only the politicians who stood to gain invested time, energy and scarce public resources to achieving the objects of BBI, including the creation of new offices designed, it seemed, solely to accommodate unsuccessful election candidates.

Mr Odinga lost the 2022 general election by repeating the same mistakes that were made when prosecuting the BBI programmes. But, I fear, he has not taken any lessons from his recent string of losses. He is banking on Kenyans' nostalgic fondness for his political battles of the past, especially the central role he played in agitating for a new constitution. Many Kenyans hold him in awe for what he did on Saba Saba and though they found it distasteful later on, they were appreciative of the rapprochement with Baba Moi that permitted him to merge his party with Kanu and his taking a cabinet position in government. His stint as Mwai Kibaki's Prime Minister was useful in dealing with the political reality of the presidential election that was stolen from him. When he attempted a similar gambit via the handshake with Uhuru Kenyatta, he failed and failed badly.

The ground has shifted significantly since 2008. There are fewer and fewer Kenyans who are willing to accommodate bloat in the senior ranks of the Government. Not in the middle of an unemployment crisis and famine. The Kenyans who were so optimistic in January 2003 have been browbeaten by relentless stories of senior politicians making out like bandits while the people they govern subsist on empty promises of development, free public services and social security for all. Lightning does not strike twice n a bottle and it is why BBI was fiasco and whatever accommodations Mr Odinga attempts with President Ruth will suffer the same ignominious fate.

Only politicians want a Prime Minister. Most Kenyans don't. Certainly, young Kenyans are only concerned about the savage cost of living. They want jobs that guarantee a comfortable life. They want social services that grant them the opportunity to found their own families and watch their children thrive and flourish. They are not interested in sustaining the exorbitant lifestyles of over-the-hill failed politicians. In the words of Ekuru Aukot, "Punda amechoka."

A revolution's gonna come

What Baba Moi had began with Special Branch torture chambers, Emilio achieved with co-option and widespread pork-barrel politics. What Uhuru and, now, Ulliam inherited was a civil society that is not just a pale shadow of its 19980s and 1990s self, but one that is utterly unable to look itself in the mirror with pride. What we used to know as civil society, especially the section that acted as the real check and balance to the institutions of the State, is a deeply conflicted sector that is today renown for the contortions it engages in to preserve its privileges, whether from foreign influence peddlers or the State itself.

Take the recent policy declarations by the Government regarding public funding for high education institutions, the re-introduction of the shamba system in forest lands, the "comprehensive" review of the competency-based curriculum for basic education, and the plan to plant 5 billion trees in 5 years. The public discussion of these issues has not been led by well-reasoned arguments from surviving members of the Third Sector but by vested political interests looking to influence the outcome not for the good of the people but in order to demonstrate ones political capital and how it can be wielded to support or undermine the still-nascent government of the day.

No one demonstrates the depths to which civil society has fallen than the Robert Mugabe of the Human Rights Civil Society. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he and his partners played a leading role, together with the Law Society and ministers of faith like Henry Okullu, David Gitari and Ndingi Mwana a' Nzeki, to hold the Government to account when Parliament failed to do so. They articulated the issues that affected our day to day lives with clarity and passion and when they aligned themselves with Opposition politicians, it was with wariness and skepticism, not with their begging bowls out as is the case today. Civil society stalwarts were notable for the personal sacrifices they made, not the longevity of their tenures at the pinnacle of civil society organisations.

With the repeal of Section 2A of the repealed constitution, the appointment of the Ghai Commission and the promulgation of a new constitution under the tutelage of Nzamba Kitonga's Committee of Experts, civil society should have evolved, maintaining a healthy skepticism of the State, its institutions and its officers, while championing the needs of the people in a changed environment, including publicly-funded universal education upto university, publicly-funded universal health services (even in the case of specialised care for chronic diseases), and enhanced food and nutrition security without undermining indigenous and traditional farming systems. Instead, civil society has evolved into a cartel of well-fed morbidly obese activists who viciously compete with each other to suckle at the National Treasury's teat alongside parliamentarians and avaricious county nawabs.

The social media musings and ravings of the Robert Mugabe of the Human Rights Civil Society are the nadir of the fall of the civil society. The way he has abased himself in service of one over-the-hill politician would only be shocking if he were alone. One of his civil society contemporaries describes himself as a political whore, only interested in his political ends, regardless of whether he is supping with the devil with a long spoon or being spoon-fed. The less said about the ministers of faith, the better, because their fall from glory has denied the people they minister to a sanctuary where their tales of suffering always received a sympathetic hearing.

Young people have always been the engines of change. But they can only change things f the things they need to imagine a different way of doing things are available to them, under the tutelage of mentors who still have a passion for doing the right thing. But our schools and institutions of higher learning are moribund, if not dead. Our news media and commentariat is only interested in belly rubs from presidents, prime ministers and parliamentarians. Our places of worship have become dens of thieves where the faithful are separated from their earnings in the name tithing, as the church of Christ withers and dies. Even playing fields, where social connections are made between children and young people from diverse backgrounds have been stolen and turned into hideous "apartments" or, worse, money-laundering enterprises masquerading as shopping malls.

When the revolution comes - we can't carry on as we are without inviting the wrath of young people - it will be a thing to behold, as all revolutions inevitably are.

Chaos as a governing principle

We have so many things that can kill us in this country. Being in this country you are a candidate for death. [Audience laughs] And because they're so many things competing for death, there's nothing wrong in adding GMO to that list. That is why we have deliberately decided to allow GMOs into this country. - Moses Kuria

The long tail of the Moism that was nurtured over twenty-four years continues to affect us in deeply unsettling and inhumane ways. Many praise the ten years of Kibakinomics and completely ignore the fact that despite performance contracting, in reality, Mr Kibaki did little to reverse the ill effects of a hollowed-out public service. Mr Kibaki's successor simply chose to throw good money after bad and when that didn't work, hand over the whole kit and caboodle to the army to sort out. It didn't work either. Mr Kuria is the personification of thirty-four years of civil service sabotage by presidents, parliamentarians, ministers of government and sundry ne'er-do-wells with such deeply embedded conflicts of interest it is a wonder they were able to achieve anything at all.

There is nothing humorous about admitting that the government you serve, and have served for a decade, has failed in its mandate to protect its peoples. There is no humour in admitting that regardless of the scientific question marks, the government you now serve intends to move forward with the introduction of genetic technologies whose benefits remain wholly unexplored, and the research into its negative effects are buried in layers of global money interests. But that is where we are today.

Governing is not easy. You must make life-or-death decisions on dozens of sensitive matters with little current information or resources, and in the face of external risks that you can neither see nor predict, all the while ensuring that the lights stay on and the masses don't set your house on fire. In order to make the best decisions possible in the circumstances, you need a plan. Such a plan must be based on a policy that analyses the issues, identifies the people capable of implementing the policy, mobilising the money needed for it, and your own skills in persuading your rivals and enemies to go along with the plan. You cannot make good decisions if all you're doing is flying by the seat of your pants, making reckless statements on the fly, and inviting ridicule and contempt while at it. You may posses the intellectual heft of an Einstein, but it is meaningless if that intellect is tethered to an overweening narcissistic desire to PWN your rivals.

President Moi predicted that Kanu would reign for a hundred years. He couldn't have known that Kanu, the political party, would exist only as a caricature or that Kanuism and Maoism would replace it. The core elements of Moist and Kanuism included cults of personality, self-interest over public interest, incompetence camouflaged by cruelty and sarcasm, wastage of public resources in pursuit of white elephants, and an inability to accept that one may not know enough about any subject matter. It is still early days with the new regime, but the signs don't point in an encouraging direction. Right from the moment a declaration on the shamba system was made, it has been one flip-flopping policy announcement after another.

Is chaos their intended objective?

The camouflage of solutionism

I once said this about the Ukweli Party of Kenya: The Ukweli Party isn't unique in this regard. It is merely one more piece of evidence that not even civil society stalwarts have broken from he neoliberalism that many claim to challenge. Instead of building a true political party, supported by its members, active in the community, its founders bought a briefcase, slapped a made-in-Kenya label on it, identified a few vocal civil society faces to stand in a few visible parliamentary elections, and flamed out without a whimper. No one can even remember its officials from 2017.

I was trying, badly, to make the point that solutionism - the overweening narcissism that defines the Third Sector - has so ingrained itself in the political discourse of this country that every political messiah believes that only he can save Kenya and for him to save Kenya, he must register his own political party without, crucially, having the patience to actually build a political movement that a party may represent. In the just-ended general election, it was alleged that because Kenyan political parties are ideology-free zones, it explained voter apathy and a below-average voter turnout, especially in the presidential election. Respectfully, I think this theory, and its corollaries, are horseshit.

The Registrar of Political Parties' records indicate that Kenya has over eighty registered political parties. I would be shocked if Kenyans were able to name ten. Azimio One Kenya Alliance had over twenty constituent parties. I'd be surprised if we could name five. The National Super Alliance that fronted Raila Odinga and Musalia Mudavadi in 2017 remains but an ephemeral image in the mind of a dedicated few while the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy that fronted Raila Odinga and Kilonzo Musyoka in 2013, has been erased from memory. None of the coalitions, from CORD to NASA to Azimio had done the necessary work of building a political movement to promote the political goals of a people; they were mere reflections of the political ambitions of one man who has unsuccessfully sought ultimate political power since 1997.

This is not to say that The National Alliance, the Jubilee Party of Kenya, or Kenya Kwanza, reflect the ideals of a political movement. The victories of their presidential candidates has nothing to do with ideological co-operation among the coalitions' members; merely the consequences of thirty years of ethnic engineering designed to win elections without building robust political institutions.

Ukweli Party attempted to swim in this cesspool. It, and similar also-ran political outfits long since dumped in the rubbish bin of history, are a reflection that civil society campaigners have abandoned the hard graft of political institution-building, for the quick-wins language of their "donors" and "partners". It is a powerpoint approach to political re-engineering: boardrooms full of committed activists who have given up on the outside world who have decided to "do something" and that something, it turns out, is to register a political party, spend a bunch of money of search-engine optimisation and similar internet dark works, pay for thousands of t-shirts, shukas and umbrellas, traverse select large towns on the backs of semi-trailers blasting Amapiano and Sauti Sol out of over-priced rented PA systems and accompanied by skimpily-clad "youth" who have been paid to gyrate suggestively to the quite-often incomprehensible music, without actually engaging with the people they intend to lead on the political questions they want addressed: unemployment, poor educational outcomes, affordable housing and healthcare, people-based policing, food security and human dignity.

Of course the law on political parties is badly written. It makes it near-impossible for upstarts like the Ukweli Party to mobilise on a national scale before registration. But that is only part of the challenge. The other part is that the sponsors of the Ukweli Party, like their other failed counterparts, did not start out with a full deck to begin with. There is no evidence that outside of the Nairobi enclave where the party emerged, Ukweli Party had representatives (or even a poster) in places like Kargi in Marsabit, Rodi Kopany in Kisumu, Matuu in Kitui, Rongai in Nakuru, Sacho in Baringo or Hola in Tana River. It existed solely in the briefcase being its certificate of registration and it failed in its mission because voters are not binders of documents to be carted about by earnest-but-misguided activists.

One piece of proof that these outfits are meaningless has to do with the aftermath of general elections. None of them, not even the parties or coalitions that successfully send candidates to State House, Parliament and county assemblies, ever hold party post-mortems to interrogate their performance in the general election or to address the legislative and policy agenda of the party for adoption by the parties' general membership. The past two weeks has witnessed parliamentary party group meetings only, as if the coalition or political parties are composed solely of elected representatives. The people, represented by the elected politicians, have already faded from public view, and their political views carry as much weight as a puff of smoke. It is why when parties like Ukweli flame out at the polls, they begin the rapid process of fading from public view. They were never intended to be real political parties but merely vehicles for a few men and women to stick their noses in the trough put out by the National Treasury for the lucky few, in the parlance of one of Ukweli's loudest stalwarts, MPigs.

The Fifth is here - I have thoughts

The inauguration of the fifth is nigh so maybe things are far enough removed from the ruling of the Supreme Court in the presidential election petition that affirmed the victory of William Ruto that we can say a few things that may or may not matter. In my opinion, many of the pundits seemed to have infused the presidential election petition with supernatural powers, capable of transmuting the base metal of missing votes into the gold of a presidential election victory for Raila Odinga. Of course, this did not come to pass and so, they have now turned to parsing the language of the judges of the Supreme Court, especially that tart remarks about "hot air" and "wild goose chase" in respect of some of the lawyers in the case.

I take the position that though a presidential election is important, it is not so important as to form the foundation for overturning courtroom principles, especially the principles relating to standards of proof. I am not one of the lawyers who will claim with any form of credibility that the electoral commission was the paragon of virtue hen it came to the conduct of the presidential election. The antics of the Cherera Rebels and the violence at Bomas of Kenya are proof positive that the commission made many mistakes.

But notwithstanding the mistakes by the commission, the threats, intimidation and violence that the commission and its officials faced were substantial and we must acknowledge that the commission did a better-than-expected job in light of this. In short, the commission's performance in the presidential election as a mixed bag.

What many of us have missed in the sturm und drang of the presidential election petition is the seismic shift in political sensibilities witnessed in this general election. It used to be that the general election was defined by the presidential election, with the down-ticket races struggling to elicit any form of sustained interest. In 2022, the majority of political passions were expended in county elections, especially the election of governors and deputy governors. The issues of development have been devolved to such an extent that it matters a lot who is elected as a governor or deputy governor and whether or not the candidate has a keen understanding of the developmental needs of the people whose votes he is seeking at the grassroots level. The presidency, with its deeply entrenched reputation for theft, looting, grand graft and human rights abuses, is slowly receding in importance and one day, if devolution is not irreparably sabotaged, Kenyans will pay more attention to who is in charge of the county government than the presidency.

We have a sense of this by how ho-hum the presidential election campaigns were. Even with the active intervention of the incumbent president, large swathes of the senior ranks of the civil service, the national security establishment, the national corporate media, and leading figures of civil society, including leading lights of the Second Liberation, the leading candidates barely elicited enough passion to make the presidential election an election o remember. Indeed, it was plain that the favoured candidate could not persuade the people who were being manipulated to vote for him to actually vote for him in such numbers as to be significant.

It is rumoured that the national security establishment fed the favoured campaign with enough bullshit as to blind them to the goings on in the ground. The promise that "the Mountain is with Raila" came a cropper; even with the sensational allegations made in court, it is plenty plain that the years that the president-elect had spent in the Mountain had paid off in spades.

I have no sympathy for the losing presidential candidates. I especially loathe the opportunistic preacher-lawyer and the pro-weed candidates for their inability to transform their presidential election campaigns into principled articulation of hard truths about the body politic. Obviously, the lack of credible corporate media coverage hamstrung them on the messages that they could propagate but the fact that they didn't even try - dry, humourless, un-thoughtful manifestos were the nadir - is an indictment of them, and us, and a painful revelation of how far we have fallen when it comes to public discourse.

I also loathe the way in which the favoured presidential candidate lost the election. He surrounded himself with highly motivated charlatans who had no interest in his victory per se but were interested in electing a puppet they could control long into the future. His campaign's spokesman did everything in his power to paint himself as the incarnation of the late Sharif Nassir, Kihika Kimani and Kariuki Chotara, albeit with a law degree and multiple post-graduate degrees to boot. He spouted the most regressive and fatuous shit that it took great effort to remember that he is a professor of law. When the annals of history are written about this phase in Kenya's constitutional development, this presidential election and its dramatis personae will feature strongly in the "lessons learned" section, with grim warning for future populist demagogues and political opportunists of every shade.

I have no idea how the fifth will rule - he intends t rule, make no mistake. He has managed to maintain a high degree of information security thus far; few people know anything about the inner workings of his transition team. There are few leaks about the shape and form of his Cabinet; who he intends to nominate to senior ranks ion the civil service; how much leash he intends to give to State organs such as KRA, the National Police Service, the EACC and the DPP. I hope you are not one of the naive people who think that constitutional commissions and. independent offices are really, truly independent. In any case, Tuesday, 13th September, beckons. Let us hear what the new rais will say on the day.