The Path to Political Ruin

The agitation to change the Constitution is a consequence of Cord leaders’ refusal to agree that on March 4, Kenyans made a choice as to their leaders. That choice was a constitutional mandate for Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto to rule and reign.~ Ahmednasir Abdullahi, Sunday Nation, 18/08/13 (Agitation for constitutional change will fail)

The words "rule" and "reign" do not appear anywhere in the Constitution of Kenya. Indeed, they did not appear anywhere in the former Constitution of Kenya. Rulers reign over a people, whether they receive the people's consent or not. In a Republic like Kenya, presidents and deputy president govern; they do not rule nor do they reign over their peoples. That is an important distinction which Mr Abdullahi seems to ignore.

Presidents Kenyatta I, Moi and Kibaki ruled. Their reigns were frequently reigns of terror. Presidents Kenyatta I and Moi detained hundreds of Kenyans for opposing their reigns of terror. President Kibaki's security ministers ruthlessly suppressed even a whiff of a threat to Mr Kibaki's presidency. It is for this reason that the Committee of Experts, even after the Naivasha fiasco, designed the presidency in such a way that the National Executive would not rule, nor would it reign over us. They deliberately designed it so that there was a system of checks and balances, similar to that in the United States of America's federal government. A popular feature of the checks-and-balances system in Kenya is that the President cannot unilaterally appoint his Cabinet; he must get the approval of Parliament. This is the case too in the appointment of Principal Secretaries, heads of state corporations, senior members of the diplomatic corps, the Chief of Defence Forces, et cetera.

Despite this, Mr Kenyatta's minions seem not to have realised this. Some of his senior-most civil servants behave as if he is a reigning monarch whose word is like holy writ from on high. They continue to issue "instructions" and "directives" over this, that or the other. They forget that they no longer enjoy untrammeled powers. They must seek the guidance of commissions, independent offices, Parliament or the Judiciary. In other words, Mr Kenyatta and Mr Ruto must govern; they must lead.

Even amongst the cognoscenti of the idea that a President rules, there have always been misgivings about the untrammeled exercise of presidential power. Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was one such person. In his Not Yet Uhuru, he did not disagree fundamentally with the idea of a president who ruled; he only disagreed with the manner in which a president ruled. He proposed a system of checks and balances that excluded constitutional and public institutions but elevated the party to play that role. It is because President Kenyatta I marginalised both the constitution and the party that Mr Odinga opposed his rule.

Mr Abdullahi must understand that in a Kenya where civil society, such as it is, is practically impotent or compromised, the only institution that can corral the presidential exercise of sovereign power is the Constitution. It is the Constitution that grants the President power; it is the Constitution that prescribes how that power is to be exercised, and how it is to be checked that its exercise is of benefit to the people of Kenya. It does not grant the President free rein to do as he pleases. In other words, Kenyatta II cannot - and should not be allowed to - rule as Kenyatta I did.

Mr Abdullahi is, of course, right: Raila Odinga and CORD are misguided in thinking that an electoral college will guarantee Mr Odinga victory in 2017. They forget or ignore that there are years to go before the general elections are held again and that is a period that Jubilee can exploit to its advantage. Even if the exercise of presidential power is circumscribed by the constitutional checks-and-balances, UhuRuto have the opportunity to use their bully pulpit to great effect. They must, however, rein in their more excitable apologists. The removal of Muthui Kariuki as the State's mouthpiece was a step in the right direction. It is only when it is impressed upon them that they must govern, not rule, that they will succeed in thwarting the plans of Mr Odinga and his cohort. If they insist on listening to those urging them to rule, that is a path to political ruin.

Shelve the electoral college idea. Forever.

This past week has seen some of the most interesting events in politics in Africa for a decade. Many hailed the Tunisian-inspired Arab Spring, believing that when it was over, democracy would bloom in the Arab world. The military coup in Egypt, the eruption of fresh sectarian killings in Iraq, the bombings in Yemen and Lebanon, the continuing slaughter in Syria, and the hands-off attitude of Barack Obama's United States would seem to belie this. In Egypt, especially, there are lessons for the burgeoning armies of Raila Odinga's CORD and Uhuru Kenyatta's Jubilee.

When Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled using emergency powers since 1980, was overthrown in 2011, even the United States was forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that there was no secular democratic process in place to replace him. They watched with horror as the long-suppressed Muslim Brotherhood swept the transitional elections, oversaw the drafting of a new constitution and installed its own man as president at the ensuing elections. The people of Egypt, initially, were willing to give the Muslim Brotherhood the benefit of the doubt; the Egyptian army was not. When it became apparent that Mohamed Morsy, the Brotherhood's man in the presidential palace, was incompetent and tending towards Mubarak-style autocracy, they simply stepped back in. What is of interest to Kenyans is the belief that a constitution is a panacea for the problems Egypt has faced has been discounted by the blood being spilled in Egypt's violent reaction to Mohamed Morsy's overthrow.

Kenyans worked for twenty-five years towards a new constitution, promulgated in 2010. The process was marred by tribal politics on a scale witnessed last during the 1997 general election. Kenyans, notoriously, refused to interrogate the Harmonised Draft Constitution; they simply fell in line with what their tribal kingpins told them to do. The many flaws in the draft were to be dealt with after the referendum. In March 2013, Kenyans elected a new government under the constitution. Uhuru Kenyatta, who was tepid in his support for the Harmonised Draft Constitution, and William Ruto, who was adamantly opposed to it, were elected as President and Deputy President, and Raila Odinga, who supported the draft wholeheartedly, lost the presidential contest and the election petition he filed at the Supreme Court.

One of the interesting events during the run up to the referendum was the debate on whether Kenya should have a parliamentary or presidential system. For three days at Naivasha, Raila Odinga and ODM were adamant that a parliamentary system was the best solution. Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto favoured a presidential system. Indeed, they favoured any system that was not favoured by Raila Odinga, so when he abruptly changed his mind and stated that he would support a presidential system they were wrongfooted and their attempts to change their minds in Parliament were thwarted. They were worried that Mr Odinga would rule like a dictator if he won the general election with a presidential system in place. In any event, they managed to triumph over Mr Odinga. He is now calling for a referendum to amend the constitution and place the power of electing the president in an electoral college after the results of the general election have been announced.

Mr Odinga and CORD are wrong. Whether they anticipated it or not, the Tyranny of Numbers Hypothesis was always part of the equation in a general election in Kenya. Despite the constitution-making process spanning two-and-a-half decades, Kenyans were not a non-tribal society at the time of the referendum, and they have only gotten more close-minded since then. In the 2013 general election, Raila Odinga controlled the bulk of the Luo-speaking vote, Uhuru Kenyatta the Kikuyu, and William Ruto the Kalenjin. This is an indisputable fact. During the election campaign, not one of them suggested that they could step down in favour of a candidate from Ukambani, Pwani, Western, North Eastern and such like. Marginalised and smaller tribes in Kenya were firmly put in their place; they would not be sending their man or woman to State House. Therefore, it is a bit facetious for Mr Odinga to suggest that part of his desire to amend the constitution is to give "smaller tribes a chance to lead."

Kenya faces many problems, but the system of government is not one of them. We have tried the parliamentary system before. It did not take. We are in the middle of implementing a presidential one. Only a full term will give us sufficient information to decide whether we want to keep it or modify it. The behaviour of Members of Parliament, both in the National Assembly and in the Senate, does not inspire confidence that when given the opportunity to elect a president, they will do so with the needs of Kenyans in mind. Therefore, the calls for a presidential electoral college should be shelved. For good.

Aiding and Abetting.

This week the Deputy President opened the annual Law Society of Kenya Conference in Mombasa, elected representatives were implicated in the poaching of elephants in Kenya's National Parks and Game Reserves, and Members of the National Assembly introduced their first Constitutional Amendment Bill to delete their offices from Article 260 (in the definition of "State Officers.")

While the Deputy President attempted to persuade a hotel full of lawyers that the Jubilee government's commitment to devolution is "non-negotiable", he failed to address the massive white elephant in the room: with the over-swift transfer of functions from the National Government to the counties, at the rather loud insistence of governors and senators, the odds of devolution catastrophically failing have become very short indeed. This might seem like the eternal pessimist finding the dark cloud in each and every silver lining, but the increasing rate of pachyderm decimation in Kenya's parks and reserves is directly linked to the sheer lunacy of enabling institutions that shouldn't, really, be enabled.

While Game Reserves and National Parks are under the jurisdiction of the National Government's specialised agencies, operations will take place at the county level. If there is any intelligence to be obtained, one can be sure that the county government will play a crucial role because of its intimate knowledge of the local terrain. But when the elected representatives at local level are part of the poaching industry, where else does the National Government imagine this information will come from? Before President Uhuru Kenyatta was railroaded into the way-ahead-of-time transfer of functions, he should have listened even to the spectacularly incompetent Transitional Authority, which advised against the full transfer of functions, favouring a phased approach that would ensure that counties handled what they could at each stage. As did the Commission on Revenue Allocation, the Salaries and Remuneration Commission and the Public Service Commission. That he did not might be held in evidence against the Jubilee administration as proof that their hearts are really set in sabotaging devolution before it takes off properly.

But it is the National Assembly's pig-headed refusal to read the mood of the nation that makes the devolution plans of the Jubilee government so dangerous. The members of the National Assembly are determined to raise their pay come hell or high water. The business of government is of secondary interest in their mad rush for the National Treasury's cashiers' counters. One would expect that the Senate, endowed with the power to protect devolution, to play its proper role. But like their colleagues in the National Assembly, the Senate has its hands full trying to persuade Kenyans variously that it is the "upper" house and that the Constitution must be amended to "clarify" its proper role in the law-making business of the Parliament of Kenya. Then there is the little-publicised tug-of-war over the national flag between the National Assembly and the Senate. The Assembly argues that governors are jacked-up councillors who shouldn't fly the national flag; the Senate says they are county presidents who must. Both are wrong and by the time they realise that flags - FLAGS! - don't mean shit in the matter of devolution, county governments will have managed to fuck up so spectacularly Kenyans will only be too happy to get rid of the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel.

Every time we read about elephants or rhinos being killed, or witness every dodgy interception of ivory and rhino horns at JKIA or the Port of Mombasa, we must bear in mind that the destruction of the wildlife that guarantees jobs and foreign exchange is being undertaken because devolution is failing, and the national Government is aiding and abetting that failure.

It's ideas, stupid.

Raila Odinga and CORD, together with Okiya Omtatah's March 4 Movement want the Constitution amended by referendum to change the way the President is elected. Their desire to see the creation of an electoral college in the style of the United States seems to be their preferred choice. They may be right that the Tyranny of Numbers hypothesis guarantees that "smaller" tribes will never get a shot at the top job if the present system is retained. Jubilee, obviously, is not amused. Kithure Kindiki has accused his colleagues in the Minority Party of attempting to hijack the Senate's plan to strengthen the Senate and devolved government for their own political ends. This is the essence of democratic discourse: point and counter-point, proposal and counter-proposal. The best idea will prevail; the worst will be rejected by Kenya's voters.

Kenyan politicians are slowly coming round to the realisation that the politics of violent confrontation are a recipe for disaster. It is the violent rhetoric of ODM and PNU in 2007 that all but guaranteed that violence would mar the results of the general election. Raila Odinga may still be sore that he is not the President, but he has realised that his best shot at replacing Uhuru Kenyatta or his successor, if there is one, is through the democratic process, not violent street demonstrations. Now that he and his acolytes have accepted that they must work within the confines of Kenya's still new Constitution, they must up their game and present credible political ideas that attract the majority of voters. So far, it is emerging that they are bereft of new ideas; their only concern seems to be that Raila odinga must be President, no matter the consequences.

We have moved on from the concept of ideology as the organising principle of political parties in Kenya. Indeed, other than the fractious and tempestuous relations between the Democrats and the Republicans in the United States, ideology seems to be in swift retreat across the world. But ideas still seem to dominate the more successful political parties. This must be the path that Kenya pursues.

It is no longer enough to Raila Odinga or anybody else to roam around Kenya demanding "change" when they are bereft of ideas. When he was Prime Minister, he demonstrated a surprising lack of originality in his political thinking. He imagined that personal popularity was sufficient to guarantee him victory at the hustings. He was wrong. He forgot that propaganda, in the place of ideology, was also a valuable tool in the process. He failed to out-propaganda Jubilee during the election campaign. He lost his chance at the Presidency and his halo of invincibility in the bargain.

He has a chance, however, to overhaul his deficit in ideas. It is slowly becoming apparent that Uhuru Kenyatta, now that he is President, is also bereft of new ideas. His government is intent in repeating the political mistakes of the past. It is attempting to rule rather than govern. The rule of law receives lip service from the President on down. No one is accusing them of perpetrating crimes against Kenyans to remain in power; but the application of the rule of law seems to be a hit or miss affair with the Jubilee government.

For instance, when it emerged that the managers of the Kenya Airports Authority and the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority were asleep at the wheel, Mr Kenyatta retreated to the well-worn strategy of ordering investigations and rearranging the deck-chairs in the HMS Titanic that is disaster preparedness in Kenya. If the President wished to send a bold new message to the public officers in his government that he would do things differently, he failed spectacularly. By transferring officers in order to address the gaps exposed by the JKIA fire. Mr Kenyatta told senior government managers that they would not be held to account for their lapses and omissions. They would not be punished; they'd would simply receive the equivalent of slaps on the wrist and life would go on. Mr Kenyatta should have fired everyone in charge when the JKIA debacle occurred, from the CEOs of KCAA and KAA to the disaster response managers at the airport.

These are the issues that Mr Odinga must expose and highlight if his arguments that the Constitution must be amended are to be accepted. He must demonstrate that the government of Kenya cannot continue to be managed in the manner that it was under Kenyatta I, Moi or Kibaki. fresh ideas must be explored in the quest to govern Kenyans better. If he maintains his miffed approach to the March 4 elections, he will not only come across as a sore loser, but an uninformed sore loser and his amend-the-constitution plans will come a cropper.

When will we change?

The roads of Accra are narrow and truly inadequate to accommodate the thousands upon thousands of apparently new drivers on them. But a Kenyan would find himself at odds with the traditional Nairobbery-style driving that we seem to have perfected. The presence of uniformed traffic police on the roads of Accra is as rare as a sighting of the blue-fin tuna off the coast of Accra, but their absence seems not to have affected their discipline while on the road. Lane discipline is elevated to an art form here. While some may be frustrated by what seem like interminable delays while burning fuel in traffic jams, they take it in stride and wait their turn. There is no need for traffic police to supplement the traffic lights: everyone drives by the rules.

Ghanaian drivers have more than reinforced the stellar reputation of their fellow countrymen. Decorum seems to run in their blood. Hooting in frustration is rare. Overlapping is unheard of. Road traffic fatalities seem to be a spectre on the TV taking place in lands far, far away. And this too in terribly humid weather accompanied by crowded pavements that force pedestrians on the motorways. Bicycles and motorcycles are not considered menaces to be run off the road. Neither, it seems, are the hundreds of four-wheeled handcart pullers. Everyone and their uncle has the right to use the public roads so long as they observe the highway code.

Looking at the go-getting attitude of Nairobi drivers especially, one is struck by the sheer selfishness of road-users in Kenya. The Me-Me-Me attitude that makes Kenyans formidable in the boardroom is completely inappropriate to the road. When we all demand, and selfishly take, any and all public spaces for our own personal playgrounds, we create problems where none exist.

I do not know whether Ghanaian drivers undergo special training before they are let loose on the roads. Looking at the state of their vehicles, I think no. This is a nation that has something to teach Kenyans in the ways of giving way in the hopes of being given way.

Kenya's brand new highways have become death traps. The City Council of Nairobi used to have a chart on the walls of the Retail Market (the Landhies Road-Haile Selassie Avenue Roundabout) detailing the number of road accidents each week. They stopped updating the chart when the numbers of those killed and injured on the roads exploded. It is now left to the National Police Service to maintain such statistics.

These numbers are an indictment of the state of traffic policing in Kenya. It is not for nothing that despite the gongs the National Police seem to earn regarding their "customer care" that the police in Kenya are considered the most corrupt on earth. When they would rather collect bribes rather than enforce the draconian provisions of the traffic act, they ensure that the traffic problems that have bedevilled us for a decade will continue to do so for another decade. If the police are so contemptuous of the law, there is no incentive for the road users of Kenya not to do likewise. We are all in this together, corruptors and the corrupted alike. The thousands of litres of blood awash on our highways seem not to have pricked our consciences. Perhaps we like it that way. Perhaps we all really have death wishes. We are the change we seek. When will we change?

They deserve contempt. No more.

If you think devolution in Kenya is going swimmingly, cease reading and find the Oprah Winfrey Facebook page instead. The antics of the 47 men in charge of county governments over the past month are shameful. It is not just that the Commission on Revenue Allocation and the Controller of Budget that say; millions of grassroots' Kenyans say so too.

Take Machakos, for example. While the governor has some of the most ambitious plans around - and these plans are rather well-thought out - some of his fundamental assumptions are flawed, to say the least. Governor Mutua intends to build a new city in Machakos; and he intends to offer investors who meet a certain threshold free land if they set up industrial units in his county. Tragically, Mr Mutua has failed to grasp with the cactus that is land administration in Kenya, particularly the fractious relations between the landed and un-landed of Machakos county that go back to the land-buying cons of the 1970s. The land the governor has identified as viable for his free-land-for-investment proposal has been the subject of disputation for three decades. He can promise his investors all he wants, but until the people of machakos come out ahead in the land deal, his plans are fucked.

Kiambu's William Kabogo was so incensed that his county assembly slashed his plans for the Governor's mansion, he refused to approve the budget. Yet, even after those characters came to a compromise, Kiambu is yet to demonstrate, by way of its budgetary allocations, that it knows what it is doing. This is reflected in the remaining 45 county budgets, never mind the ones that have very ambitious deficits to finance.

Devolution was supposed to be the magic bullet that would bring development to the grassroots. No one thought to describe what "development" was. There are those governors who are shocked that the National Government will still build highways and high-tension power lines. Hydropower dams? Nairobi's in charge. railways and harbours? Nairobi keeps those too.

Whether Dr Evans Kidero or ex-commandant Kinuthia Mbugua want to admit it, theirs are jumped-up local authorities, and no more. They are not, and cannot be, the equivalent of the National Government, even collectively, never mind what "experts" and the Senate think. Their priorities, therefore, are to halt the rot that had set in as a result of the management of mayors, council chairmen and councillors and reverse it, where they are able. They are responsible for the the things that make urban life miserable: traffic, sanitation, primary healthcare, public health, water and sewerage, markets, street lighting, and such like. Before they can demand jurisdiction over doctors, nurses or teachers, governors must demonstrate that they can make the lives of the residents of their counties comfortable. Until they do, and if they insist that flying the national flag is vital to their "authority" or that they must have diplomatic passports and armed guards, we must treat them with contempt. That is all they deserve.

Godmen to death and darkness.

If you want to pick a fight, engage in thoughtful discourse on sex, politics or religion. That, it seems, to be the three main reasons Kenyans are ever at loggerheads with each other on social media platforms. But, this past week, a 'Pastor' went out of his way to ensure that the collective Christian community was tarred with one very odious brush.

Generally we are very accepting of the snake-oil salesmen who pass themselves off as men of the cloth. We forgave, or forgot about, that dodgy pastor who paid hookers to proffer testimonies of healing powers in his church. We forgave, or forgot about, that pastor who was engaged in a lurid love affair while he was married. We forgave the two Catholic priests who accused each other of attempted murder, though it is the one with the firearm that seemed to have gotten the short end of the legal stick. But this charlatan, on air (apparently he has a TV show), decided in his sick, twisted, perverted mind to parade an HIV positive child naked on TV, revealing the child's nakedness to the congregation and the world as well as his no-longer-fatal condition.

Many have called out the agents of the State to take action. They will most likely be disappointed. If the Director of Public Prosecutions has seen fit to maintain his usual stoic silence in the face of national infamy, you can be assured that the prosecutors in his office are equally silent and equally stoic. If the boss is going to sit on his hands then by God so are they. There will be no flashes of independent thinking out of the automatons in the Office of the DPP. The same, it seems, applies to the Inspector-general of Police and his troops, the mandarins of the Children Department, the fire-breathing Secretary-General of the National Council of Churches of Kenya, Canon Peter Karanja (perhaps it is only politics that will get him to pontificate on TV), or the Archbishop of Nairobi, John Cardinal Njue, or the Cabinet Secretaries and their Principal Secretaries in the Interior Ministry or Social Services Ministry. For all the promises made by politicians, their acolytes and godmen in Kenya, we are well and truly on our own.

What has not been highlighted, especially given the explosion of fly-by-night religious operations in the past decade, is that the Church of Christ, and the Church that man built, are two very different things. In Christ's vision of His Church, the weak and the downtrodden would find solace; faith would move mountains; the wealthy would share with their fellowman; everyone would play their proper roles in the Kingdom of Heaven. The Church that man built, however, is a dog-eat-dog world; Darwinian Natural Selection applies. The strong survive; the weak are carrion for the vultures of society. This particular pastor is just one among thousands preying on the vulnerable amongst us with impunity.

But his impunity is not surprising. Church has become business. If you want an easy source of income, and if you demonstrate a facility with reading and interpreting complex texts into simplistic messages, the pulpit is for you. All you need, it seems, is forgo your humanity and millions of shillings shall be yours. We, the congregations of Kenya, have allowed this to happen, because we have been seduced and have succumbed to the lure of the filthy lucre we see being flashed about by the lesser mortals of the political class. The wheel has turned and we are never going back to the less-complicated days when there were the established churches and the recognised independent churches. We find ourselves in an era where if the church does not fleece you it will be ruined and it is your duty to allow the church to steal from you down to your last morsel of food.

Obama will never put others first. Never.

Reading Ahmednasi Abdullahi's diatribe against the United States' foreign policy in the Sunday Nation, this blogger is compelled to ask: What, exactly, would one expect of the world's policeman? (The duplicity of America's foreign policy, 11/08/13) In the relatively uncomplicated world of the Cold War, foreign policy was reduced to an either/or equation: you were either in the Western Bloc (the US, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, et al) or you were in the Soviet Bloc, led by the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialists Republics. Then came the event the Western Bloc had been working towards, the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the Soviet Union. For a time, the world had only one hyperpower, though in the past decade the United States' stature has diminished because of the 2001 terrorist strike by al Qaeda and the decade of war in the Middle East.

Many, wrongly, assumed that the United States would prosecute its foreign policy with them in mind. Nothing in US history suggests that this would or could happen. When Calvin Coolidge declared that the [chief] business of America is business, he signalled to the rest of the world that US foreign policy would be guided by its desire to dominate the world markets for its own profit. Nothing in the intervening century or so suggests that US foreign policy has shifted to taking into account the interests of its interlocutors ahead of its own. So, we ask again, in pursuing its interests in the Middle East, what would Mr Abdullahi have President Obama do?

What we must consider is how the Middle East will react to US policy. The options, especially for the dictatorships that agree with the US line, are severely limited. If they wish to trade successfully in the world, they must take into account how the world's most vibrant market will react to their moves. China has come to appreciate the special place the US occupies in world markets that even while it rises as a powerful counterforce to the United States in Asia, it will not do anything that will jeopardise its relationship with the world's leader in banking, finance and technology.

These are the choices that confront the dictators in the Middle East. If they dare pursue policies that place American interests at risk, they know that their legitimacy in the Middle East, in their homelands and in the corridors of world finance will come under increased pressure. Whenever there is a hiccup in the supply of crude oil, it is only after the United States starts to feel the pinch in the spot market that Saudi Arabia, the country with the largest spare capacity, will lead the rest of the OPEC to pursue policies designed to calm the oil market.

In his first major address to the Arab world, Barack Obama promised to listen more and to promote the rule of law and the interests of the people in the governments of their choice. His naivete was charming. Realpolik eventually put paid to his lofty goals. He has a constituency to appease back home. American voters, especially the committed hardcore that votes in party primaries and caucuses, will not stand idly by as the US President places the interests of foreign powers ahead of those of the United States. They will punish the President by electing Representatives and Senators who will make it their mission to scuttle all his foreign policy plans. Mr Obama, regardless of his personal abhorrence for the use of drones in undeclared wars, will continue to pursue America's enemies if it means maintaining peace at home. The US voters will force him to retreat on his programme of spying on the electronic communications of Americans, but they will not forgive him if he does so too for foreigners out to destroy the American Way of Life.

This is the reality that Mr Abdullahi must grapple with. If the United States was a world government, and the citizens of Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Egypt had a say in its foreign policy, then Barack Obama would not be able to walk all over them in the name of US national security. If the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund had the power to compel the United States to do as it was told, then Barack Obama would always go, cap in hand, to their headquarters for permission to do what needed to be done to keep the American homeland safe. But they don't and he won't. In the words of George HW Bush, Barack Obama will never apologise for America doing what needs to be done in order to feel safe.

Strip them all of their armed guards.

Rasna Warah asks the question that we all refuse to confront: Where's the moral compass that will steer us out of this morass? (Daily Nation, 12/08/13) The example she confronts us  with should be pursued to its extreme conclusion: why do we spend vast sums of national treasure keeping elected men and women safe from the very people who elected them?

When Daniel Toroitich arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki left office they left safe and secure with vast wealth that could sustain hundreds of thousands. Yet, because they had been Presidents they were awarded what amounts to a moral slap in our collective faces. There is absolutely no reason why Messrs Moi and Kibaki need to trouble the National Treasury by cashing in their pension cheques or snaffling the millions of shillings we pay them in allowances. They hold no national positions; for all intents and purposes, they have completely withdrawn from public life. If we wish to demonstrate our gratitude for their stewardship of the ship of state, we can distribute commemorative plaques on the anniversary of their installment as president. Handing over tens of millions of shillings to billionaire retired presidents until the day their shuffle off their mortal coils is perverse in a nation that cannot care for its weak, needy, sick and downtrodden.

Even with that longwinded diatribe, it is the incumbent elected class that takes the biscuit. In a nation where men, women and children live under the constant fear that they may be felled by a criminal's bullet or a policeman's...or both...it is completely unfathomable why we will spend billions of shillings over the next five years keeping our elected representatives safe from their constituents. We will assign "State" officers police bodyguards; but we will do nothing to protect the women and children living in our "informal" settlements from the parasites that prey on them. How can the Cabinet Secretary for Labour, Social Security and Services continue to call on the services of the all the armed policemen assigned to hi when he knows that women and girls living in Kibera, Korogocho, the Mathare Valley, Dandora, the various Mukuru settlements...cannot leave their hovels at night for fear of being sexually assaulted? How can the Cabinet Secretary for the Interior and Coordination of National Government? Or the Attorney-General? Or the Director of Public Prosecutions? Or the Speakers of Parliament? Or the Governor of Nairobi?

Our priorities have been subsumed to the greedy needs of the men and women who seek to reign over us. Our government has forgotten that the power and authority it exercises comes from us, the people. We are the sovereign power of this nation. We deserve, more than they do, the safety and security that they enjoy at our expense.

If Kenyans want to see an end to runaway crime, they should try a simple experiment. Retain security for the President and Deputy President, the Cabinet Secretaries of the Interior, Defence, Foreign Affairs and the National Treasury, the Chief Justice and the Chief of Defence Forces. Everyone else, including Governors, Parliamentary Party Leaders, the Speakers of Parliament and the county assemblies, the heads of parastatals...the whole lot, should be stripped of the armed police dogging their every step in the name of bodyguarding and watch how swiftly they act in concert to bring down the violent crime rate in Kenya. It is only when they face the same personal security challenges we do that they will concentrate their minds in finding a solution to all that ails us. Until they walk a mile in our shoes, they will continue to behave as if they are the Kings of England and we are serfs to be ignored, bullied or both, simultaneously.

The ghosts do not rest easy.

While stories of Kenya's colonisation are suffused with tales of wise seers who foresaw the coming of the white man with his trains, bibles and guns, they sometimes do not capture the incredulity of the natives confronted by the spectre of the pale faces and what they brought with them. Imagine that you are living in Kenya at the turn of the 19th Century, knowing what you know about the two seasons and the link between man and the earth. Imagine, again, that you are told that all the gods you worship and all the rituals you perform to appease the gods are wrong, intrinsically and inherently wrong. Imagine, instead, that you are taught that there is only One True God and that He is One-in-Three: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Your questions about the incredibility of the Holy Trinity are swatted aside as the rantings of a man who refuses to be "civilised."

Now imagine that the "laws" that govern your bucolic society are declared irrelevant. That the land tenure systems you adminster are wrong; the white man has come with contracts and leases and treaties and that these are the correct way to govern your society. And because your primitive government is wrong, because your gods do not really exist, it is time for you to bow down to the mighty white man's wisdom and offer fealty to a king, or queen, many weeks away over the seas. To ensure that you do not go back to your primitive ways, you are herded into villages, you are constrained by taxes which you cannot pay, or you are attacked with weapons that you do not understand. Over a period of 60 years, all that you knew to be true is taken away from you. Your land, your stories, your government and your gods. In the end, you are a squatter on your own land. And the white man will kill your fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters to keep it that way. Worse still, the white man will persuade some of your fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters to kill you and your family if you resist the white man.

Now imagine again, that you have successfully removed the white man from your land. He is gone but his odious ideas remain. They have become the norm. They are the standard with which to measure all other ideas and all other ideas fall short of the glory of the white man's ideas. Your government is the white man's government; your gods are no more; and your land is still not your own. To cap it all, there is still a white man living on your land telling you that regardless of the fact that the white man's government is gone, the white man was still right to do what he did.

There are men and women in Kenya, both white and native, who still cling to the idea that the British civilising mission in East Africa was the right thing to do. They refuse to accept that the British used their law and their bible and their guns to turn the true owners of the land and the mineral wealth and bounty of our land into their own Shang-ri La. They refuse to acknowledge that even if the Mau Mau were bloodthirsty brigands, they had every right and more to attack and kill the perfidious and iniquitous white man.

Obviously we cannot turn back the clock to 1897, but we cannot go on pretending that the colonisation of Kenya was the right thing to do. We cannot accept that the Emergency was the right way to deal with the Mau Mau threat. The brutal atrocities visited on the Kikuyu by the British, their Home Guards and their African loyalists - the same people who claimed to be warriors for Christ - were wrong. Her Majesty's Government has gone out of its way to lie and cheat, and to hide the proof of their brutality from the eyes of the world. They have attempted to hide from the world the viciousness of their treatment of the Kikuyu and Kenyans in general. The torture. The starvation. The casual brutality. The murders. Their chickens are coming home to roost. It is not just Kenya. The ghosts of the Chagos Islands will not sleep easy. The victims of the Boer Wars will not rest. In the fullness of time, the British will be forced to reckon with their iniquitous past. And so too will the remaining apologists for Britain's civilising mission.

Fire Them All.

While this author absolutely loaths the brutal way in which the British went about in their civilising mission in its East African colonies, the civic infrastructure they left behind when they finally gave up on their mission is a thing to behold. When they were in charge, and they had successfully managed to isolate the natives in low-end estates in the Eastern parts of the Capital, they managed to create a public emergency response system that had it been maintained, would be the envy of the rest of Africa bar, possibly, South Africa. The fire that engulfed parts of the JKIA complex this Thursday are a sad reminder that the natives in charge of disaster management in Nairobi, both in the national government and Evan's Kidero's county government, are about as capable as three-year olds with AK-47s. In other words, they are most definitely part of the problem.

Since the fatal collapse of the Sunbeam Supermarket building along Tom Mboya street in the 1990s, Nairobi has held its breath every time there has been a high profile disaster. When al Qaeda decided to test its death delivery systems in 1998 in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, it took the capable assistance of disaster response units from as far afield as Israel to point out the ever mounting short-comings of the Kenya Army, the Nairobi Fire Service, the Kenya Red Cross and the scores of privateers who descended on the scene of the US embassy bombing. Today, Uhuru Kenyatta and Evans Kidero have egg on their faces because their governments failed to appreciate the moribund state of the country's premier entryway. That it took more than thirty minutes for fire crews to arrive on the scene, and then took them a further six hours to put out the flames, is an indictment of their disaster-preparedness strategies and managers.

Mr Kidero is on the record that the response units for the airport are under the jurisdiction of the Kenya Airports Authority and the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority, two parastatals that have their fair share of shady goings-on in their boardrooms. But he cannot escape blame: some of the fire trucks despatched to JKIA belonged to his fire service. That it took them thirty minutes to fight through Nairobi traffic is evidence enough, if more is required, that he has completely let the ball on the traffic management of the Capital, fall from his hands. Again. Instead, just like the remaining hyenas in the counties, he is more interested in his chase cars and their sirens while he rushes to this meeting or the other, tweeting about it all the way.

Uhuru Kenyatta has a more fundamental decision to make. The Boards of both the KAA and KCAA are renown for their boardroom clashes when it comes to the question of public procurement. The CEOs of these key agencies are always chosen based on how well they are capable of "managing" the multi-billion shillings contracts that come around every few years. It is whispered in the corridors of power that the right man in the job is worth a few billion shillings in kick-backs. Obviously, while these CEOs have their eyes firmly fixed on their interests and those of the shadowy unknown, their management of the disaster-preparedness of Kenya's airports receives scant attention. Events like the JKIA fire, and the frequent black-outs at Mombasa's Moi International Airport, as well as the frequent near-disasters at Eldoret Airport are multiplying frighteningly while these men twiddle their thumbs. Mr Kenyatta has the power to send the Boards of these parastatals packing. That he is yet to do so leaves us with one conclusion: he doesn't really know what to do.

Three days after the fire, Kenya is looking to foreign powers to assist in determining who was responsible for the mistakes that led to the disaster. We all know who are responsible. The President knows it; the Governor knows it; the Cabinet Secretaries of Internal Affairs and Transport know it. All that remains is for the President to fire those that need to be fired and start with a clean slate. Kenyans will not mourn the removal of these criminally negligent gentlemen. We do not need the FBI or Scotland Yard to point out that our airport managers have been asleep on the job for dog's years. Fire them all.

Ghana!

A week in Accra and I can't wait to go home. The food is a mix of remarkable amounts of salt and, when you dare ask for anything curried or spiced up, truly astounding quantities of spices. Then there is the water situation. I don't know about you, but every morning when you see lines of people carrying twenty-litre jerry-cans to fetch water, your faith in the absolutely persuasive exhortations of your hosts that tap water is safe to drink ring a wee bit hollow. Please don't get me started on the sheer lunacy of driving on the right. Or the fact that their matatu crews are as tame as church mice.

Of course, I jest (but not about the water; drink it out of the tap at your peril). Accra is a surprisingly sedate town. I find it difficult to refer to it as a "city" when is so small. The people, for the most part, are indifferent to the visitors amongst them. However, when you engage them in chatter they prove warm and welcoming. Maybe a week is too short a time to be absolutely certain about their nature, but they seem almost Kenyan in their attitudes. Our fellow Ghanaian students though, are a bit of a handful. Loud, very opinionated and quite frequently, annoying. Maybe this is the "Oga" lot that we see on West African TV shows and movies.

The streets of Accra are quite busy. Traffic jams almost rival those of Nairobi the only difference being the orderliness of Accra drivers, even those of their matatus. Public transport though, is not on the scale of Nairobi; hundreds, it seems, of taxi-cabs proliferate. The innocuous hoot of a taxi driver looking for a fare has become ubiquitous for us by now.

We are yet to truly sample the local cuisine; the fear of ending up with snails or monkeys on your plate is a powerful deterrent. We are making do with the rice/chicken combo for now sometimes varied with the KFC and Galitos fare at the two fast food joints on Oxford Street, where we are staying.

The Ghana School of Law, for all its continental fame, seems a rather small outfit. They are just joining the Twenty-first Century digital age and it remains to be seen whether the material on offer by the school stacks up against the likes of the Kenya School of Law or not. The faculty, though, is top-notch, taking care not to overwhelm us with their erudition and skill. Prof VCRAC Crabbe is a joy to listen to; he makes the business of drafting legislation seem so ho-hum. But then again, he's been doing it since the days of Moses, so there's that.

The down-time is exhausting. With only one lecture a day, and about an hour of one-on-one time with the faculty, our days are quite long and boring. Ghanaian TV is dull; as is their music. But tomorrow's Saturday so perhaps we may get an opportunity to sample some of their clubbiest night joints. So far so-so. Let's see how the 12 weeks unfold, eh?

Still sunny; more shady people, though.

[Kenya] is a sunny place for shady people. - Gen George "Bobby" Erskine, 1953

When one casts their eye over the events of the past five months, one cannot help but notice the carnage taking place in Kenyan society. The inept National Police Service, even after the merger of the Kenya Police Force and the much-reviled Administration Police, has failed to stem the tide of violence against vulnerable Kenyans. The perpetrators of vicious violence in Busia and Bungoma still walk free, the suspected al Shabaab bombers of Garissa and Mandera are still yet to be apprehended and, ironically, policemen are turning their weapons on their fellow officers with increasing regularity. Teachers have already been on one strike and it is a toss-up whether the inept Cabinet Secretary for Education will fuck it all up and send them back on the streets again. If Kazungu Kambi doesn't get his act together, university lecturers, nurses and doctors will soon be singing "Bado Mapambano" before the month is over. Then yesterday a mysterious fire razed through Units 1 and 2 of the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport prompting the President and Nairobi's Governor to "rush to the scene to oversee operations." This too coming a few days after one of Kenya's shadiest sons proclaimed that God would fight his battles for him regarding the "unfairness" of the treatment being meted against him in his battle to retain his duty free shops at the ill-fated airport.

Kamlesh Pattni, who nowadays dons the mantle of a man of the cloth, is simply Kenya's most brazen shady character. He has to contend with the title for the shadiest with Kenya's legions of politicians and politically-connected entrepreneurs. To return to the burnt out husk of JKIA, few Kenyans doubt that the tender to refurbish the terminal will be left to a properly qualified contractor; without a shred of doubt, we all know that only shady contractors with dodgy credentials will get beyond the tender-qualifications stage and only the dodgiest of them will win the tender. This is the legacy of Britain's civilising mission in Kenya.

This has been the story of Kenya since the British decided to hand over the place, kit and caboodle, to the "natives" back in 1963. As we celebrate the fiftieth year of Independence, it is time we came to contend with the men and women who have consistently stymied our efforts to overcome our colonial past and our inherent suspicions about the motives of our fellow-Kenyans. Regardless of how we define it, corruption has been the single string that runs right through the fifty years, uniting disparate characters with disparate personalities but all united in profiting where they did not sow.

Looking at the administration of land in Kenya, the reason why Kenyans fought the British throughout the Emergency, one cannot help but wonder whether the freedom struggle was worth the blood. Even as late as 2008, Kenyans were still losing their land violently and at the hands of men and women connected to the political establishment, just like the Kikuyu of the White Highlands lost theirs. An examination of the relationship between the State and Kenyans, one is struck by the similarities with the relationship between the colonial government and the "natives": the hated kipande (national identity cards), the provincial administration and the iniquitously biased application of the rule of law to protect the rich and powerful. Modern day Home Guards and loyalists are everywhere to be seen, using their positions of power and authority to subdue and subjugate the silent majority too afraid to speak up for fear of ever greater retribution.

Public discourse on matters of national importance are coloured by allusions to loyalty and trust; it is, in some quarters, considered treasonous to criticise the Jubilee State. In some quarters, it is considered ethnic hatred to consider that some politicians should call it a day after a frustrated run at the top seat. It is impossible to have an impartial political discourse in Kenya today and it seems it is going to remain the same for the foreseeable future. This jubilee year is set to be grand disappointment. Kenya remains a sunny land, give or take climate-change-induced sunniness. It's just that there seems to be ever greater numbers f shady characters than before.

Wrong on the merits.

In his Closing Statement in the August issue of The Nairobi Law Monthly, Ahmednasir Abdullahi makes such sweeping assumptions about the motivations of the doyen of Kenyan opposition politics that it is difficult to know where to begin in setting him straight (Raila Odinga needs a job urgently!) But it is in his assertion - more of an accusation - that Raila Odinga is speaking as he is speaking and doing as he is doing to remain relevant that must be rebutted, even if imperfectly.

I am on record that Raila Odinga has taken many missteps in his abortive journeys to State House. He has made the wrong friends and alliances and has made decisions that have continually denied him the presidency. However, the claim that he is now irrelevant is simply not accurate. It is wrong on the face of it and it is wrong at a fundamental level.

To demonstrate its inaccuracy one need only witness the froth-mouthed reactions of the likes of Muthui Kariuki and every UhuRuto apologist every time Raila Odinga speaks to a national matter. Even the sentiments he expressed at the funeral of the fifteen children killed in a road traffic accident in Kisii were not so far off the mark as Mr Abdullahi would have the readers of The Nairobi Law Monthly believe. The proof is in the manner in which the Jubilee supporters reacted. Rather than challenging his words with counter-facts of their own, they went to great lengths to demonstrate that it is monstrous to turn a funeral into a political venue. They seem to forget that in Kenya, since the dark days of Operation Jock Scott and Operation Anvil, funerals have been where Kenyans, especially politicians, have taken their sub rosa battles against the State to the people. Even President Kenyatta's miffed supporters must concede this point.

To whether Mr Odinga must exit the political stage, matters are much more complicated as the author of the Closing Statement refuses to concede. For ill or good, Mr Odinga has been the x-factor in Kenyan politics since the 1990s, especially in the waning days of his late father's navigation of the opposition boat after Baba Moi's triumphal return to State House in 1992. For whatever reason, Mr Odinga has been painted as a power-mad socialist out to "make the Kikuyu pay" for unmentioned slights that have been visited on the Odingas specifically and the Luo in general. But everything he has done, especially since the day he uttered the fateful "Kibaki Tosha!" belies this easy narrative.

Whether Mr Odinga retreats from politics is as much his decision as it is that of the legions of supporters who want him to stay. For whatever reason, millions of Kenyans still repose their faith in Mr Odinga's stewardship of the Minority Party even if he holds no official position in the Parliamentary Party. While his mistakes have ensured that ODM is seen as a Luo party, no one can deny that CORD still enjoys broad national acceptance save in the citadels of the Rift Valley and Central Kenya. The elected representatives of Kenyans in the remaining parts of the country, especially in those counties where CORD rules the roost, continue to believe that Mr Odinga can offer them leadership in navigating the ever-changing and treacherous waters that are Kenyan politics. Who are the likes of Mr Abdullahi to decide whether Mr Odinga's sell-by date has arrived?

I do not think that Mr Odinga has another presidential campaign in him. Politics is now a young man's and woman's game and the clamors of the next generation of politicians in both CORD and ODM will only grow as the next general elections draws near. Mr Odinga has the opportunity to steer the Minority Party to victory if he takes time to fine-tune its strategy and promote the ambitious among the next crop of its political leaders. If he selfishly listens to the voice of those who need his gravitas to survive and fails to ensure the rise of his successor, then the carping of the Jubilee supporters will be seen as oracular prophecy than the insensate twaddle that it is.

No place for Capital Punishment in Kenya.

The death penalty is an anachronism in the Twenty-first Century, even in Kenya where the rule of the jungle seems to prevail everywhere. During the late John Michuki's reign of terror as the Internal Security minister, the reports of "extra-judicial" killings of suspected members of the proscribed Mungiki reached alarming proportions. It got worse when civil society's human rights activists seemed to be targeted by the police in an attempt to cover up the killings and disappearances of the Mungiki adherents. This is but one example why Kenyans cannot trust the Government of Kenya to fairly enforce or uphold the penal provisions of the Laws of Kenya regarding capital crimes or punishment.

Indeed, since the last executions, circa 1987, Kenya has had an unofficial moratorium on the carrying out of capital sentences. As Newton Arori notes in August's issue of the Nairobi Law Monthly, even Mwai Kibaki, John Michuki's boss, rather than sign the Death Warrants lying on his desk, chose to commute death sentences into life imprisonment. Mr Arori is wrong to presume that the moratorium on capital punishment is Kenya's attempt at political correctness or, to quote a rather apposite British quip, keeping up with the Joneses. In Kenya's case, even while Mr Michuki was overseeing the wanton killing of those who would not toe his line, Mwai Kibaki must have realised that Kenya's history of capital punishment was a very dark one and that, rather frequently, innocent Kenyans had been sent to the gallows.

The theories of retributive justice that Mr Arori quite possibly ascribes to are no longer viable in the Twenty-first Century "Digital Age." They are a throwback to the days when the State, in all its manifestations, was omnipresent and omnipotent. There is no justification for the Government of Kenya to continue imposing the death penalty when it has proven itself quite inept at promoting the rule of law, protecting the innocent and their properties, or properly prosecuting the perpetrators of heinous crimes. Casting a look back to the horrific events of late 2007 and early 2008, one is struck by the casual employment of lethal force by the Kenya Police, the indiscriminate shedding of blood by the supporters of the various political camps and the destruction of lives and properties on a large scale as was witnessed. Since those dark days, the Government, on whose shoulders the responsibility for investigation, prosecution, conviction and execution lies, has studiously avoided apportioning blame where it rightly belongs.

Even with the promulgation of a Constitution in August 2010, the victims of the violence are yet to receive justice, the perpetrators of the violence are yet to be properly investigated, charged in criminal courts, prosecuted, convicted or punished. The independent Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has somehow managed to fumble the ball; hundreds of investigations into the violence are yet to be concluded. The Judiciary, as it is wont, has declared piteously, that its hands are tied by the law and that it cannot intervene in the affair.

In such an inherently iniquitous system, it is rank irresponsibility or callousness or both to suggest that the administration of justice infrastructure of Kenya is well-placed to oversee the application of the capital-crime provisions of the laws on the law books of Kenya. We cannot trust that the police will do a good job investigating the offences; we cannot trust that the Director of Public Prosecutions will handle capital cases any more competently than he will handle other criminal matters; we cannot trust that the Judiciary will not sit on its hands and bemoan the constraints of the law. The system is broken. To insist that murderers, armed robbers or traitorous Kenyans will receive a fair shake in the corridors of justice is to willfully blind oneself to the decrepit system that we inherited from the British.

And the British have much to answer for; if it were not for their conduct in the dying days of their empire, Kenya's administration of justice machinery would be vastly different. Testimonies from the accused "terrorists" of the Mau Mau who survived the Emergency are replete with stories of kangaroo justice, extra-legal executions, judicial iniquity and the pervasive and systematic employment of the entire machinery of the Government to subdue and subjugate all freedom-loving Kenyans. Mr Arori may not appreciate the sombre significance of words such as Olenguruone, Manyani or Lari, but a careful re-reading of Kenya's dark past will persuade him swiftly that the application of capital punishment in Kenya is something that must do away with. Swiftly.

Reforms are still a ways away.

When Ndung'u Wainaina declares in this month's Nairobi Law Monthly that "police (sic) is a critical and most visible cog of the criminal justice system," he adopts a United States of America interpretation of the role of policing in civilised society (Reform or perish, are the only options for Kenya security sector, July 2013). Mr Wainaina fails to appreciate the significance of what he alludes to in his article; that the Kenya Police has had a peculiar history because of the way Kenya was colonised by the British.

The Americans are obsessed with their criminal justice system, even though it is one of the most dysfunctional in the developed world. It is a system that has the highest population of incarcerated convicts in the developed world and one that prioritises prosecutions over public safety. The obsession of American politicians with their various "wars" (War on Crime, War on Terror, War on Drugs, etc.) means that the government's obsession with stamping out crime simply leads to ever draconian laws for the prosecution of these wars. Even the sunniest optimist will admit that the American way has proven woefully inadequate.

We attempted a mongrelised American security system in Kenya, especially with the Constitution. Even the declaration in Art 239(5) that "the security organs are subordinate to the civilian authority" seems like our developing fetishisation of the American Way of doing things; who among us believes that the security apparatus of Kenya is not subordinate to the civilian authority as embodied in the person of the President or the Cabinet Secretary? What we did was to simply add two new institutions to play an oversight role over the security apparatus: the National Police Service Commission and the Independent Policing Oversight Authority. With the proposed amendments to the policing laws of Kenya it is time we admitted that neither the Constitution nor the National Police Service Act or the National Police Service Commission Act have done much to reform policing or the police apparatus in Kenya.

What the mandarins in charge of police reforms should keep in mind is that because of Kenya's history, reforming policing in Kenya cannot be a bastardised version of the developed world's, but one suited to the unique circumstances we find ourselves in. To achieve the transformation of the Police Force into the Police Service, the reform process must first admit that the connection between policing and politics cannot be broken entirely without the entire system crumbling in chaos. Once we accept that policing in Kenya is a vital cog in the political process, rather than in the so-called criminal justice system, then we may begin to make headway in the process of reforming policing in Kenya.

Presidents in Kenya have always preserved their authority and power by using the security infrastructure, that is the police and the intelligence services. In the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, the dreaded Special Branch was the principal tool for interdicting political threats to the Presidency. In the beginning of the Twenty-first Century it was the General Service Unit and the Administration Police's Rapid Deployment Unit that were the principal tools in the extra-legal executions that engulfed Mwai Kibaki's first administration. Until we can persuade Kenyan Presidents that it is no longer necessary to use the coercive power of the police to preserve their authority and instead use the police to ensure the safety of the public, reforms will remain an exercise in futility.

India and Pakistan have been in a state of phony war since they were ripped apart in 1947. Since the Kargil War in 1999, they have engaged in series of confidence building measures designed to reduce the level of hostility between the two governments. These measures do not address the core areas of dispute between them, but are instead supposed to encourage the two nations to build ties that will allow them to finally negotiate in good faith. Kenya needs a similar exercise if it is to succeed in reforming policing, and the security apparatus. These measures must begin by ensuring that the men and women in uniform serve with dignity. Their training must prepare them to view members of the public as customers and not a threat to the stability of the State. Their welfare must form an integral part of their service. It is important that the facilities available to them enhance their dignity and not degrade their souls. The poverty and filth to which the rank-and-file are consigned must be made a thing of the past. Housing, healthcare, transport and family services (including education) facilities must be made available to them. The "small" matters at the periphery of the reform process must take centre-stage for the moment; the "big" ones must await the enhanced confidence in the process that will be engendered.

Finally, we must stop fetishising the Constitution; it is a vital document in the continuing democratisation of the nation. But without the complete and engaged buy-in of the people of Kenya, the Constitution is more like an albatross around our collective necks. We are yet to internalise the civics lesson that the Constitution attempts. Until we do, all the policies and reform programmes in the world will not be worth the paper they are printed on.

The true human rights tragedy.

When Ken Wafula declares, in Ease the Repression, on the flimsiest of proofs, that human rights advocates [are] living in fear, he takes hyperbolic Third Sector yammering to new lows (Daily Nation, 25/07/13.) He bandies about phrases popularised by American spy movies such as "secret service agents", "private intelligence reports" and "counter-intelligence." But he, like the legions of like-minded activists in Kenya, fails to provide a shred of proof that thesituation is such as he describes it to be.

Let us not for one minute presume that the Government of Kenya under the charming but iron-fisted grip of the Jubilee Coalition, has allowed the expansion of the "human rights space" claimed by the likes of Ken Wafula. But that is not sufficient proof that they have become the targets of the Government, that the mysterious and unexplained deaths of activists is necessarily at the hands of State agents, or that their continued arbitrary arrest, detention and prosecution is a strategy aimed at keeping them busy fighting court battles rather than street battles in the name of human rights.

Mr Wafula, and his fellow travelers, have been unable to point to a single instance where President Kenyatta has been shown to have ordered that the human rights heroes like Oscar King'ara and Paul Oulu be "eliminated" by whatever means necessary. Even at the height of the 2007/2008 crisis, human rights advocates did not accuse Mr Kenyatta of targetting human rights activists; rather they simply accused him of human rights violations. Even the mysterious deaths of Messrs King'ara and Oulu were not part of a broader accusation of a State-sanction assault on the human rights citadel, rather it was alleged that it was a cover-up ploy to ensure the truth about the murders of Mungiki, suspected or confirmed, adherents at the hands of policemen and intelligence officers.

This blogger is well aware that the Government of Kenya has not covered itself in glory when it comes to the expansion of the enjoyment of inalienable rights Kenyans enjoy. Because of the mindset of the Kenya security establishment, the focus of the intelligence and police agencies is to preserve the State from all threats, regardless of their benign appearance of ineffectualness. It is for this reason why Inspector-General Kimaiyo, CID supremo Ndegwa Muhoro and NIS Director-General Gichangi have been quick off the bat to reign in the March 4th Movement despite what the Constitution clearly says. Indeed, if one were to scour the law books, whether it is the Penal Code or the Anti-terrorism Act or any of the security-related laws we have, one will be hard-pressed to find the offenses for which Eliud Owalo is being questioned by the CID and the police.

A popular American TV show from the silent twenties had characters known as the Keystone Kops whose incompetence became legendary. It is time we reflected deeply on the continuing incompetence of the national Police Service, the Administration Police Service, the Criminal Investigations Department, the Banking Fraud Unit, the Anti-terrorism Police Unit, or the disbanded Anti-Stock Theft Unit. The human rights tragedy is not that Ken Wafula and his ilk are being treated unfairly; the tragedy is that a decade or more since Daniel Toroitich arap Moi was shoved out of State House, Kenyans cannot count on their government to protect them from foreign bombers, homegrown professional extortionists or well-connected fraudsters. Whether it was under Moi or Kibaki or Kenyatta, Kenyans have continued to be on the receiving end of violent crime that it beggars belief that all that blood does not seem to have pricked the conscience either of the We-are-being-finished human rights industry or the mandarins in charge of public safety in the Government of Kenya.

Protocol theatre of the macabre.

Our obsession with the creature comforts of men and women who can afford them without troubling the Exchequer give rise to absurd situations. Take for instance Kethi Kilonzo's brief and ill-fated foray into the murky and mud-splattered political. Regardless of what her ardent supporters say, it is quite evident that her explanations for why she remained unregistered did not persuade less emotional observers of the facts. But it is when she claimed that her registration was completed in the same registration register that President Kibaki completed and that this particular register, according to the IEBC, had been "lost" that the theatre of the absurd veers off into the farcical or macabre, depending on where your conscience directs your thoughts.

When Mwai Kibaki marked half a century in the sharp-elbowed world of Kenyan politics, the newspapers were at pains to remind Kenyans that the President had represented Othaya Constituency since 1974. If the law was applied "without fear or favour" as the Commissioners of the IEBC swore to do, Mr Kibaki should have completed his registration in Othaya at a polling station of his choice. Instead, the IEBC went to great expense for the pomp and circumstance of having His Excellence the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defense Forces to be the First Voter of Kenya by opening a "special" register for the President, moving his polling station for the purposes of voting to the precincts of the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (Starehe Constituency) in Nairobi, and promptly closing the register after the farcical exercise. Then Kethi Kilonzo came along claiming that she too had been registered alongside the President. The IEBC had two choices: produce the Kibaki register and disprove Kethi Kilonzo's assertions or, as it turned out, claim that it had been "lost."

We need not bother with the absurdity of the Kethi Kilonzo/IEBC drama at this instance; rather it is the absurdity of treating VIPs and, in Kenyan parlance, VVIPs as if they were Titans of old who had challenged the ancient Greek gods on Mt Olympus. Before the late Mutula Kilonzo entered elective politics, he built a legal practice that remains the envy of many. He amassed great wealth, and power, by representing the well-connected and the politically powerful in Kenya. We may quibble about the choices he made while in private practice; but none doubts that it is his intelligence and legal-eagleness that brought him the wealth and recognition that he enjoyed till his death. But beyond that, especially when he served as Minister, Mutula Kilonzo went out of his way to play down the power he wielded. He surprised many of his interlocutors with his apparent humility. It might have been politically calculated, but his humility when in power endeared him to millions of Kenyans, not the least the tens of thousands who elected him Makueni Senator.

In contrast to his humility is the fawning brown-nosing of senior civil servants, especially those obsessed with "protocol." It is protocol that led to the erstwhile Prime Minister to bitch about "nusu mkeka;" it is protocol that compelled the idiots in the IEBC who set it up to ensure that President Mwai Kibaki would be registered in his own register. If they hadn't fiddled with the law in order to make the President feel even more special, they would never have faced the accusations of unfairness when they declared before the Supreme Court that the law, as written, was wrong and that the IEBC's "register" was a moving target that changed shape and volume as the IEBC deemed fit.

Protocol sometimes leads to absurd situations that should not arise in civilised society. Frequent visitors of public buildings will be confronted with the phenomenon of the "VIP Lift" (why a VVIP one is yet to be installed remains a protocol mystery that may never be solved.) But every now and then, a building (such as Sheria House) enjoys such a high volume of human traffic that it is near impossible to retain one lift for the exclusive use of the babus of the Government of Kenya. In such instances, the babu and his (or her) minions must share the same lift, which almost never happens because the askaris have been sensitised that the moment they see the babu's chauffeur-driven Passat (for the lucky ones) or Avensis (for those nearing the top), they are to call for the lift from wherever it may have stopped or, if it is already on the ground floor, to eject every single of the babu's minions that may have entertained ideas of riding in the same lift as their boss.

In Kenya it is not enough to recognise the special place a nabob occupies just by awarding them a really fat cheque at the end of each working month, we also infuse him with god-like powers to make those who serve under them live lives of abject humiliation. Whereas the nabob has a private loo for his sometimes irregular bowel movements, his minions have to make do with ill-lit smelly boxes that may or may not have ventilation or running water. While the nabob has at a minimum three secretaries, their minions require remedial computer-training; not even a copy-typist is available to set their documents in the "official" font. Whereas the nabob need not identify himself to the askaris at the door, his minions must go through the daily humiliating ritual of proving their identity and the privacy-invading search of their private bags when they depart after a frustrating day at the work-wheel.While the nabob may even end up with two desk-top computers, three massive printers, a laptop and an iPad, his minions share pre-Windows-XP computers, their printers are frequently out of toner or paper, and procurement of their facilities lasts three years or longer. But minions, of which the Commissioners of the IEBC increasingly resemble when in the presence of mandarins from the Presidency, still fawn and ass-kiss as if their very lives depend on it. If it is not macabre, what is it then?

What price our contempt?

An argument that is being advanced by the disappointed supporters of Kethi Kilonzo is that the courts must look for the "spirit of the law" when making decisions. This is one of the stupidest ideas ever advanced in free Kenya. Not the "spirit" part, but that this principle should be applied at the first instance. A corollary to this proposition is that the courts must apply the technical rules of the court or the law while arriving at decisions that have a huge public interest. Again, this is sheer lunacy.

These ridiculous arguments have been advanced since the ill-fated Raila Odinga petition against the election of Uhuru Kenyatta was dismissed by the Supreme Court. The decision of the Supreme Court was hugely unpopular in CORD strongholds, and while the former Prime Minister and former Vice-President claimed that they would accept the verdict of the Court, their utterances, and those of the lunatic fringe of the CORD bandwagon, belie the acceptance of the Supreme Court's decision. When Mutula Kilonzo died, and the idiots in Jubilee decided to wade into the by-election by promoting the candidacy of his widow (before she eventually withdrew from the race), the more excitable elements of the CORD army decided to promote Kethi Kilonzo as the panacea for their shambolic political activities since March. But a series of mis-steps by the popular lawyer put paid to her political career before it even began.

It is at this point that the strange calls for upholding the spirit of the Constitution were made. First things first: there is always a presumption that the drafters of the law knew what they were doing, and that they intended to do what the law says. The first responsibility of the court is to look at the letter of the law. This includes the rules of the court. If we were to operate outside of the rules we ourselves have drafted, then the existence of those rules is redundant; we could as well live in a state of perfect anarchy. You only look to the spirit of the law when it is apparent that the legislative intent of the law cannot be discerned. Statutory ambiguity will trigger a search for the spirit of the law.

What is awkward is that the Kethi Kilonzo cheering squad seems to believe that the spirit of the law could only have favoured an interpretation of the law that promoted her interests, and not those of any of the other parties to the dispute, especially not the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. Indeed, it seemed at one point that her lawyers intended to argue that because the IEBC was a singularly inept and incompetent institution, and despite the fact that it could justifiably be demonstrated that she committed electoral offences, the courts should ignore the "self-serving" ruling of the IEBC "tribunal" and allow Kethi Kilonzo to stand for her late father's senate seat. They added, repeating an argument that had been rejected by the Supreme Court, that the technicalities of the process should not apply because it was in the greater public interest if Kethi Kilonzo vied for the Makueni Senate seat despite not being a registered voter anywhere in Kenya.

These arguments are of a piece with the "democratisation" of the nation since the 2002 NARC victory. The effect has been to make Kenyans ever more contemptuous of the law, especially Kenyans in positions of power or authority and those who hang around them. It is why governors see no irony in using sirens and chase cars to avoid traffic jams wherever they find them and conveniently forget that if they were effective governors, there would be no traffic jams to begin with. It is why more and more Kenyans are seeing their properties being demolished by road construction crews claiming that they "followed the procedure" when they were irregularly allocated land in road reserves or some other public land, when they had the allocations legitimised with title deeds and when they studiously ignored municipal laws when they proceeded to build on their ill-gotten properties. Many are now praying for the sympathy of Kenyans who did not have the opportunities to game the system as the road-reserve victims did. What is notable is that Kenyans are not outraged that these people lost property because of the corruption of the agents of the State; they are outraged that they are not as "smart" as the men and women whose houses now lie in ruins.

Our continuing contempt for the law, the rule of law or the mores and customs that should inform our day-to-day lives is proof positive that regardless of the lofty aims contained in the Constitution and the laws of Kenya, our obsession with power, money and the attendant trappings have blinded us to concepts of decency and decent behaviour. It is why we see nothing wrong in the son or daughter of a powerful man inheriting his political mantle even if she has to do unfair things to do so. Whatever the motivations, it is wrong to encourage people to have a jaundiced view of the law or its institutions. The more their contempt for these things grows, the less likely they are to have a shared national purpose, vision or mission.