Nine years. That’s how long Kenya’s Parliament has sat on its hands since the High Court gutted the defective recall provisions in the Elections Act back in July 2017. Nine years of pious speeches about the will of the people while quietly ensuring that will can never bite them.
Article 104 of the 2010 Constitution could not have been clearer: the electorate has the right to recall an MP, and Parliament shall enact legislation to make it happen. “Shall,” not maybe one day when we feel like it.
Instead, our legislators did what they do best, which is, nothing. Or rather, they did something worse: they fixed the law for Members of County Assemblies in 2020 because county legislators are small fish whose removal barely ripples the national pond. But for themselves? Radio silence. The same people who thump their chests about devolution and accountability suddenly discovered that recall was too complex, too open to abuse, too sovereign to keep their jobs safe.
Former IEBC CEO Hussein Marjan put it bluntly in his 2024 letter: the Commission “cannot take any steps as regards a petition to recall a Member of Parliament owing to lack of comprehensive legal framework.” Translation: we have a constitutional right with no operating manual because the people who are supposed to write the manual like being unrecallable.
The 2024 Senate Bill that finally limped into existence is still trapped in bicameral mediation as of April 2026; a classic Kenyan legislative coma where urgency goes to die.
Let’s call this what it is: stark naked self-interest dressed up as constitutional caution. MPs know that in a country where voters are increasingly furious about stolen taxes, ghost projects, and MPs who treat constituencies like personal ATMs, a functioning recall law would be electoral napalm.
One viral scandal, one Finance Bill-style betrayal, and suddenly a petition with verifiable signatures could send an MP packing. Better to keep the sword of Damocles permanently sheathed above their own heads.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. These are the same lawmakers who ram through amendment bills when it suits them, who lecture us about national values under Article 10, and who never tire of reminding us that sovereignty belongs to the people under Article 1.
Yet when that sovereignty threatens to exercise its recall muscle, they become sudden sticklers for proper procedure.
The 2017 judgment didn’t kill recall; Parliament’s chicanery did. The 27 member Constitutional Implementation Oversight Committee (CIOC) from the tenth parliament, chaired by Abdikadir Hussein, with Millie Odhiambo-Mabona as his vice chair, must shoulder the blame. They took the Elections Bill through First reading to Presidential assent in a record 4 days, from 23rd to 27th August 2011.
Meanwhile, citizens are left watching the 2025 High Court petition grind slowly through the system, begging judges to do what Parliament refuses: declare Article 104 self-executing or order the law passed yesterday. Public pressure after the 2024 protests forced some movement, but not enough. The message from Parliament is unmistakable: you can vote us in, but good luck voting us out mid-term.
This is not governance; it is tenure protection masquerading as democracy. Every day the recall law remains unpassed is another day the 2010 Constitution is treated like an optional suggestion rather than the supreme law. Kenyans did not endure decades of struggle for a new constitution only to watch its most transformative provision neutered by the very people it was meant to restrain and hold accountable.
The clock is ticking. If Parliament cannot find the political courage to legislate accountability for its own members, the courts must step in and compel them, or citizens will keep finding new, louder ways to remind their representatives that seats are not lifetime appointments. Nine years is already an insult. Ten would be unforgivable.
