2020 will be the best time to relook at our Constitution

In another two days, we shall be in the year 2019. During the year just ending, many significant things have happened at the various levels of our existence.

I dare say that this year did not start exactly as it is ending and that we are all better off for that fact. The previous one ended at a time our country was so divided and with a lot of negative energy and suspicious feelings all over the place. We must thank God that we are in a better place right now.

We all know that the reason for all that negativity and division was the nature of our politics leading to the contentious conclusion of last year’s presidential elections.

DELICATE

Those are events that one would want not to witness any other time in the future. To make sure that this does not happen there is a lot of work to be done by all of us. Of course there are those who have a higher responsibility and who must lead from the front.

This ending year has seen a few positive things happening which were long overdue. Take the fight against corruption which is the biggest evil in our social, economic and political existence. Something has started happening which never happened before.

Someone somewhere seems to have made a decision that something must be done. Look at the demolitions of buildings which were corruptly built on road reserves and other environmentally delicate areas. Such are things that would not have been seen in the past.

STATEMENTS

Going back to the divisions and negative feelings left behind by last year’s elections, a rather significant event took place last March.

To the surprise of the majority of us, the two bitter rivals in that contest came together one morning and, under the glare of cameras, shook hands and gave statements to the effect that they would unify the nation. That symbolic act has produced good results. They called it ‘building bridges.’

There have been many efforts to make Kenya a better place, one of the longest adventures in this regard being the struggle for a Constitution that is our own.

We finally got there in 2010 and so now we have a Constitution with which we have experimented for the last eight years.

EXPERIMENTATION

In this experimentation we have seen tensions between Parliament and Senate, between governors and senators, governors and MCAs and so on. These things seem to have been calming down in 2018.

In 2020 we shall already be 10 years into our self-made constitutional order. By then we ought to have known what changes in our Constitution, if any, we need to make.

A very happy 2019 to you all.

Fr Wamugunda is the Dean of Students, University of Nairobi. [email protected].