Case for expanded Executive

The most contentious proposal in the Building Bridges Initiative report is that on the expansion of the Executive as many Kenyans wrongly believe it is a bid to “create jobs for a few individuals” and is “too expensive for Kenyans”. 

That is a very simplistic and lazy way of thinking.

First, the Kenyan State is a compromise; in fact, a forced marriage. More than 40 communities with different languages, cultures, histories and beliefs were made to coexist without their consent.

Prior to the Berlin Conference, synonymous with the infamous Scramble for Africa, convened by Otto von Bismarck in 1884-5 — and before the British East African Company was granted a charter in 1888, leading to the colonisation of the country — today’s Kenya might only have existed in the mind of Mepoho, the Giriama seer from Kaloleni.

Were these communities to naturally grow, they would have evolved into modern states like the ones in Europe — such as Cyprus, Montenegro, Luxembourg, Malta and Iceland, which have populations of at most 1.2 million and at least 339,747. There are others — like Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco and Vatican City — that have populations of 76,976 to even 1,000, in that order.

Homogeneous State

There are other small states with similar or even smaller populations outside Europe. Nonetheless, the Kenyan communities somehow coexist, unlike in counties like Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan, which have found it painful and, sometimes, unbearable.

We can’t continue sitting on a pin and pretending that we cherish the current structure in the Constitution.

That Kenya is not a homogeneous State should be reason enough to expand the Executive. As much as we evade it, Kenya is made up of tribes, which are the basic mobilisation tool in our politics.

Let us have an Executive that at least portrays the realities of the Kenyan State. The absence of an inclusive Executive is the reason for the overbearing presence of tribal fear, tension and violence in every electoral cycle.