Tension has been building up in the Jubilee party over the chairmanship of certain parliamentary committees. An argument has been advanced that Jubilee’s leadership wanted to evenly distribute the positions to regions that overwhelmingly gave it support in last year’s General Election. To that end, a Jubilee parliamentary group meeting was called at State House during which party leaders were said to have stated who they wanted to chair specific house committees.
While the rank and file were expected to comply with that directive, there were those who thought differently.
No doubt Kenya is a democratic country where leadership is elective. Those seeking to lead must subject themselves to an electoral process in which both the majority and the minority have their say. It is this simple tenet of democracy that the Jubilees top leadership seems to have ignored.
Members of Parliament Alfred Keter, Silas Tiren, James Gakuya, and Kangogo Bowen vied for various house committee chairmanship positions and got elected to the Labour, Agriculture and Livestock, Broadcasting, and Environment, Water and Mineral Resources committees respectively.
That is how democracy works, and the MPs who elected them exercised their constitutional right to do so. Soon after the elections, there were schemes by Jubilee to de-whip the four. However, the legislators sought recourse from the courts and obtained restraining orders. Apparently, that did not deter Jubilee, for a few days ago, the party called a parliamentary group meeting at which MPs were directed to withdraw their support for their four colleagues as committee chairmen in an attempt to oust them, court orders notwithstanding.
Such machinations make nonsense of democracy and our claim to being a democratic state where the free will of its people is guaranteed.
MPs are elected to serve the interests of their constituents, and house committees advance those interests.
More importantly, the separation of powers between the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary must be seen to work.
The Constitution was one way for the country to move away from the era when Parliament and the Judiciary were extensions of the Executive, serving at its beck and call. Today, that is anathema and dangerous to democracy.
In the middle of the acrimony threatening Parliament, the deafening silence of the Speaker of the National Assembly should worry rather than bemuse us. Whose interests is he serving?
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