Kenya needs new champions to protect the Constitution

NAIROBI: The fifth year of implementation of the COK 2010 comes to an end in a few weeks. With this will come the dissolution of the CIC, which had been mandated with overseeing the implementation of Kenya’s new Constitution. In the absence of the CIC and with the Jubilee government having eliminated the Constitutional Affairs Ministry, there is a real danger that the profile of constitutional implementation in the nation’s psyche will be significantly reduced. I sincerely pray that time proves me wrong.

Without doubt, the Constitution introduced significant changes in Kenya’s political and administrative structures, including constitutionalising devolution, reengineering the human rights framework and bringing in hitherto unimaginable separation of powers and checks and balances within the governance system. The Kenya of 2015, at least institutionally, is fundamentally different from the Kenya of 2009. There is no question that the framers of the Constitution, spurred on by decades of lost opportunities for recalibrating the Kenyan State, and seeing too visibly the unfortunate effects of bad governance in the post-election violence of 2008, were too ambitious, nay, naïve, in their expectations of what the Constitution could achieve within the short timelines they accorded its implementation.