Judiciary, like Executive and Parliament, must keep country safe

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The basis of any public office, as many have pointed out, is the people it serves. We, the people, are the owners of all authority and sovereignty. We only donate it in different forms to different individuals when it serves us right.

So every time we donate out authority and power, the beneficiaries of the donation must always remember which side of their bread is buttered and pay due allegiance. Because, to paraphrase the sages, we are paying the piper and should by all means be allowed to choose the tune. Always.

And the Constitution, that sacred document that binds us together as a community called Kenya, like the Christian’s Bible or the Muslim’s Quran, gives guidelines on how and when we can donate the power and authority to those among us we deem fit.

In our collective wisdom, complete with our fallibility as humans, we chose to define how to govern ourselves and donated that government to, like the Biblical Trinity, to three arms, three institutions which we also elected to design in the best way we thought how. We also agreed in principal that the three will be institutions. Not individuals, not tribes and not families or fraternities.

But because institutions need drivers to deliver, we logically decided that we will fill them with persons complete with guidelines on what to do, when to do it and how. The bottom line, however, is that the holders of the brief in the three institutions should always work for the common good.

To aid in the pursuance of the collective good, the Constitution always acts as the overall guide. The Executive, Parliament and the Judiciary are the three arms of government that to whom we have donated the authority to pursue and deliver the “good”.

Majority to prevail

The three must ensure that every moment is better that its predecessor, today must be better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today for the collective we. Where there seems to be a contradiction between and individual’s interest and that of the majority of Kenyans, the majority must always prevail, regardless of who that individual is.

And that should bring us to reflect on some decisions made on our presumed behalf in the recent past and evaluate the wisdom behind them.

The country is in a rather precarious situation now with too much anxiety, uncertainty and tension. It obviously is not “the good” we envisaged when we assigned responsibilities to the trinity hence a call for a relook. One can rightly argue that the rain, to borrow from Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, started beating us as we prepared to identify who to assign the two roles of Executive and legislature last year. We all remember the confusion that marked the General Election of August 8 and its immediate aftermath! But the hailstorm and its attendant gigantic hailstones seem to have descended on us when we invited the third arm to intervene in the confusion, as it should.

When the Supreme Court made the unprecedented decision to annul the August 8 presidential election, it sent the country into a deeper level of the confusion it had been called to diffuse. First, because something like that had never happened in the history of the country and second, the guidelines it gave for the conduct of another election were too vague and unrealistic for any party to comprehend and align in the short period it prescribed.

The winner in the annulled poll was, predictably, appalled while the loser was ecstatic in his celebration. The situation was  however to change a few days later when the seemingly vanquished picked up his pieces, counted his losses and bounced back to the battle ground with renewed vigour while the assumed victor recoiled and begun crying foul, yet again.  From then on it has been one decision after another from the Judiciary. The Legislature is uncharacteristically quiet while the Executive seems to have decided to take charge, as it should.

Buck stops here

But there has been a re-energised debate on the decisions coming from the courts and the reaction, or lack of it, by the Executive. Some court decisions have been met with disdain and indifference by the Executive arm raising questions whether it is the presidency’s deliberate resolve to ignore its Judiciary partner in government.

While I cannot pretend to know what the Executive thinks, I cannot help but guess that it might have realised that to make an omelette, it has to break a few eggs, to fully defend and protect the greater public good, some decisions from some quarters have treated with reservations.

It is time the three arms of government is seen to be working together for harmony in the country, as they should, and realise the common good.

We have seen situations in the past where courts, in good faith, grant rights to individuals only for those individuals to visit terror on larger populations effectively denying the community its own rights.

As 33rd US President Harry Truman once said, “You know, it’s easy for the Monday morning quarterback to say what the coach should have done, after the game is over. But when the decision is up before you - and on my desk I have a motto which says The Buck Stops Here’ -the decision has to be made.”

The buck stops with all the three arms.

Mr Mureu comments on socio-political issues