Kenyans should firmly reject Mudavadi's referendum push

Kenya has entered 2026 riding on waves of controversy: The mystic caravan to Singapore; the unexpected departure of Cyrus Jirongo to the hereafter; proposals for expanded State digital surveillance of private life; the uncertain future of the Orange party; a confounding school system – and much else besides.

I open this first column of the year with the State’s proposal to amend the Constitution. Last month, Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi floated the idea of a constitutional referendum. Among other changes, it would extend the presidential term from the current five years to seven.

Mudavadi has not merely revived an old debate. He has reopened a dangerous question Kenya avoids confronting with honesty. Are constitutional referendums instruments for empowering citizens, or are they tools for caging and managing them? 

Kenya is still struggling to conduct credible elections. To curb voter bribery. To restore faith in democratic institutions. Against this fragile backdrop, Mudavadi’s proposal carries the unmistakable scent of elite reflex-reach for the Constitution, for political expediency. It reads less like statesmanship and more like summoning the people to sanctify executive mischief.

Such whims recall, painfully and uncomfortably, Sembène Ousmane’s unsettling phrase: “God’s bits of wood.” Are we, the people, mere pieces of timber in the hands of the political elite? Are we to be counted, exchanged, burned, and manipulated at will? Are our laws another bundle of firewood, conveniently in elite laps? 

In Ousmane’s novel God’s Bits of Wood, European colonial masters treat Africans as objects. They count, deploy, exhaust, and discarded them, once they have served power. Ousmane’s setting is colonial West Africa. Yet, has the mindset survived independence? In Kenya, citizens are routinely reduced to political instruments. Elections are corrupted through voter bribery. Cash, food, and petty inducements are shamelessly dispensed.

This transactional manipulation of the people is not generosity. It is manufacture of consent. It is not empowerment; it is coercion through poverty. Political rallies operate on the same logic. Attendance is driven less by persuasion; more by the expectation of handouts. Crowds are assembled to produce the appearance of popularity; not to interrogate ideas. Citizens have become dramatic props – useful for optics, disposable once the cameras go. Politics degenerates into theatre; participation into acting.

These practices are not limited to proposals like extending presidential terms. They are normal enablers. Populations used to transactional politics are easier to mobilise for elite-driven constitutional goals of the sort Mudavadi now fumbles toward. People are treated as fragments; summoned to rubber-stamp decisions already settled elsewhere.

This is the danger in Mudavadi’s renewed enthusiasm for a referendum. Kenya’s recent history offers little evidence that such initiatives arise from a genuine concern for the public good. They bear the unmistakable marks of elite bargains disguised as national interest. Kenyans are not being invited to deliberate; they are being invited to participate in a ritual of symbolic validation.

Extending presidential terms under such conditions is not a neutral technical adjustment. It is a test of intent. In a system already straining under weak accountability, compromised electoral credibility, and recurrent abuse of State power, longer presidential terms risk entrenching incumbency, while further weakening public oversight. Proposing such changes without first repairing the democratic foundation is treating the people not as authors of the republic, but as instruments for stabilising elite arrangements.

The deeper danger is habituation. Voters now expect bribes. Rallies without handouts feel pointless. Have Kenyans come to accept that they are mere objects in elite political hands? Have they quietly agreed to become sawdust? Democracy does not collapse in a single dramatic moment; it erodes gradually, almost imperceptibly. Is this where Kenya now stands?

Ousmane reminds us that dehumanisation is neither natural nor inevitable. It can be resisted – and defeated. Transformation occurs when people recognise their shared dignity and act together: not as clients of power, but as authors of their common destiny. They refuse, collectively, to remain raw material in someone else’s whimsical hands.

Kenya’s prosperity will not come from longer presidential terms, elite pacts, or endlessly revised constitutional articles. It will come from rejecting transactional politics –  when votes are not sold, crowds are not hired, and constitutions are not tailored to the ambitions of powerful self-seekers. We are approaching such a moment. Kenyans should firmly reject Wycliffe Musalia Mudavadi’s referendum push.

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke