By Anyang’ Nyong’o
anyongo@yahoo.com
The Jubilee leaders have called for national reconciliation in Kenya. They have even gone further than that: they have declared the year 2014 as a year in which they will focus on uniting Kenyans: a commitment that is laudable and appreciable until you go beyond the words spoken by the mouth to the deeds performed in action.
Our Constitution says very simply and clearly that Kenya shall be a multi-party democracy governed by the rule of law. It confers equal rights to Kenyan citizens irrespective of their political beliefs, ethnic identity, color, sex or age. Kenyans as citizens pay taxes to the state with which it runs public affairs and provides services to the people. Nowhere in the Constitution does it give power to anybody to deny any Kenyan a job, or an opportunity to access public services, on the basis of his or her political association, voting behaviour or ethnic identity. Currently, however, woe betide those Kenyans who are not Jubilee compliant: they are losing jobs, contracts and government tenders.
The Constitution was meant to mark a fresh start in democratising the public service after decades of its being misused by the one-party system and the authoritarian presidential regimes that have ruled this country since independence. The details that the Constitution provides in establishing institutions, rules and procedures that can safeguard the rights of citizens, tame the tendencies for governments “to go rogue” and ensure neutrality of the civil service in matters political are quite elaborate. But apparently all that is now beside the point: we are more or less back to the building of ethnic hegemony of the Jomo Kenyatta and Moi years. The more things change the more they remain the same.
Reformist as the Constitution is meant to be, it unfortunately was left with one major problem: a presidential system of government. This is a political albatross that will continue hanging around our necks and undermining the good things in our Constitution for some time to come. Sooner rather than later I hope Kenyans will wake up and embrace a parliamentary system of government, which will give better political midwifery for our democratic rights. Why do I say so?
If you carefully examine some of the issues getting the Jubilee government into trouble you will realise that they all boil down to the misuse of the presidency as an institution. It may not matter who runs that institution: it will still be misused given the enormous propensity of that institution to beget impunity. In fact the Deputy President made this point poignantly and slyly at the same time: the president could not have been wrong in making appointments; he was simply misadvised. Impunity, as it were, must be shielded from public accountability.
The presidency today is a composite of two offices: the president and his deputy. These two offices are anchored in two parties: the TNA and the URP. These two parties are further anchored in two ethnic communities both of which have elites who claim entitlement to all public offices and services: the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin. A situation like this spells disaster to a Kenyan nation, which is multi-ethnic and multi- party, and where the Kikuyu and Kalenjin masses are also victims of the elite manipulation of ethnic symbolism.
We currently have the disaster of elite ethnic discrimination staring us in the face as state jobs are shared wantonly through the presidency based on the binary equation that Jubilee has employed. No amount of appeal for national unity or reconciliation will appease the nation: anger, frustration and disappointment is the mood among those who are seen as “outsiders” in the application of this equation because of the way they voted, their ethnic identity and their absence in the corridors of power. We are unlikely to prosper nationally as long as the politics of exclusion gives opportunity to only a few people to climb the ladder of success.
The frustration deepens when one notes that access to state power under a weakly accountable presidential system leads to tremendous accumulation of capital and wealth by the few in power. I therefore see ourselves entering into a new phase of struggle for national liberation in Kenya. This is the liberation from the authoritarian presidency and the establishing of a truly parliamentary system of government to safeguard the democratic gains we have in the present Constitution. The Jubilee government is not at all Constitution compliant by any stretch of the imagination. It is pure and simply Jubilee compliant and it conducts itself as such.
To avoid any future government behaving like Jubilee has done we need to look carefully at the weaknesses in the Constitution, which has made Jubilee get away with the constitutional transgressions it has so far committed. Beginning from the Bomas Draft of the Constitution to some of the earlier drafts by the Group of Experts, we shall find very good formulations for the parliamentary system of government and proportional representation, which we had preferred. These will be crafted into draft amendments of the Constitution and subjected to debate by all Kenyans in the new initiative. I would like to appeal to civil society organisations to be vigorously engaged in this process just as we did prior to the advent of the current Constitution. A Luta Continua.
