We're in danger of sliding back and killing hard-won freedoms

Teargas shell lies on the road as police battle protesters along Juja Road where residents of Mathare were protesting the high cost of living on July 12, 2023. [Denish Ochieng, Standard] Very serious wrongs that endanger our nation are going on. This past week's events have made them clearly visible. We are in grave danger of a return to authoritarian rule. Among these serious wrongs are: 1. The regime is blocking collection of signatures against it. 2. The regime is preventing the exercise of the right of assembly by blocking leaders so that the intended assemblies do not take place. This is abolishing the right of assembly under the Constitution, Article 37. 3. The police are being made part of the political purposes of the regime, including mouthing its political messages publicly. 4. The regime has lost its constitutional direction. It has no answers. It has stopped even pretending to listen to the people. 5. The biggest danger is that regimes like this, when failing this job of constitutional governance, begin putting their feet on a different and dangerous path. They fall deeper and deeper into the use of illegal orders to the police, live bullets, false arrests, torture, disappearances, fatal car 'accidents', extreme laws in a compliant parliament, forcing civil servants to obey illegal directives, the desperate siphoning of public funds while the going lasts. This is the slippery slope upon which this regime is now teetering. It must step back from this. To this regime, the answer to anything people ask for, is resort to naked force. It continuously seeks to dictate acceptance of whatever it has pronounced, whether in matter of taxes, petrol prices or cost of food. This regime is making our Police Service into Kenya Kwanza's army against the people. And thereby showing even before a year is out, that it could, even involuntarily, slide into an openly authoritarian regime, which would pretend to follow a constitution while, like now, continuing to break it. All this is not new. It was done before by the previous authoritarian Kanu regime. It is the common practice of all defensive authoritarian regimes. We have to resist, and the regime itself must guard against, and restrain itself, from moving to, this anti-national and anti-constitutional tendency. All these dangers have been illustrated by the conduct of this regime and police in events of the past week. One case is dangerously instructive. On Saba Saba Day, the police arrested Maria Mbeneka and Ndiritu Muriithi at Nyahururu in Laikipia County. As they alighted from their vehicle to join others gathered there, the police in large numbers swarmed around them, and blocked them. The police then began forcibly pushing them into a police car. The two kept asking the police what law they had broken, and demanded to be informed why they were being arrested. The process was caught on film. A few police officers were addressing the two courteously. But what followed was shocking: while the screen was filled only with the many police officers and Mbeneka, there was an answer to their protests. Apparently from the persons on the screen could be clearly heard the words: Hapana hapa. Mwandamano hapana hapa. Mwandamano Kisumu. This was a political statement during a police operation. It was targeted at one ethnic community. It was a partisan statement of one political party, not of the police who cannot make such statements. It was dividing the nation and was profiling Kenyans. It was incitement at Nyahururu against those from Kisumu. It exposed how the regime will treat 'Kisumu' in development - unequally. This was not isolated. The same message was repeated a few days later. This is so destructive of a united Kenya, even one with dissent among ourselves, that the National Commission for Integration and Cohesion (NCIC) must begin investigations. This response of the regime is contrary to the Constitution's most basic foundation: that we are "one indivisible sovereign nation, and we are determined to live in peace and unity" as such sovereign nation. (The Preamble). The first article of the Constitution vests this sovereign power in the people of Kenya. Article 1.(2) then goes on: "The people may exercise their sovereign power... directly ... ." The mwandamano is a direct exercise of this sovereign power. And the regime must remember that the Constitution is the manifesto of the people. -The writer is senior counsel

We're in danger of sliding back and killing hard-won freedoms

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