Contest to change the law misses the point

The validated Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) report is out and barring a calamitous political occurrence over the next few months, there is going to be a referendum to pave way for constitutional amendments that should, among other changes, reconstruct the Executive wing of government.

President Uhuru Kenyatta set the tone when he described this as a constitutional moment and exhorted Kenyans to have the courage to change those parts of the Constitution that were not aligned to what he considers the greater interests of the country.

 He was at pains to dismiss the notion that what is being pushed by the proponents of the referendum – chief among them the Orange Democratic Movement leader Raila Odinga – is an expansion of the Executive to create more seats to be shared among leaders of tribes.

President Kenyatta said Kenya needs a dispensation that extracts from the country’s politics the venom that spreads fear and anarchy at every election cycle. This is the poison that stalls the economy a year to the elections and takes another year after the elections to wash out of the system.

The President’s description of the symptom may be right, but I don’t see how constitutional change is the prescription for what he is describing. This is partly because he has misdiagnosed it, itself a direct result of listening to the wrong people or choosing not to hear the right messages.

More positions

It has been repeated often that some sections of the Constitution may need reviewing but the intention should not be to create more positions at the top. An urgent amendment could be to reduce the size of government and redirect the savings to other starved but important social sectors like health and education.

The burden that ultimately stymies every initiative, however well intended, is corruption. It is a billion-dollar yoke that constantly smothers any effort to trigger real growth and create an environment in which every Kenyan has the opportunity to legitimately earn from their honest endeavours.

What we now have is this dystopian reality in which almost everyone has assumed they must be paid, even for doing what they are legally employed to do.

Although he swore to tackle corruption, the President and his deputy have been ineffectual. If anything, it has been demonstrated that under them, the State has been effectively captured by corrupt cartels.

Development accelerators

These cartels conceive of projects – yes, the mega ones that are constantly touted as development accelerators; ensure that they are mainstreamed in the national budgets and funds allocated (or preferably borrowed), then they broker the jobs for their Chinese benefactors! When they are not doing these, they just steal by supplying very expensive air and mobile junk as clinics to the Health Ministry.

These corruption merchants frustrate any efforts to address the historical injustices that are a cause of real conflict or enduring mistrust between communities and the government.

They are uneasy, hence make it impossible for mechanisms (like a legitimate and functional Independent and Electoral Boundaries Commission) to be put in place to ensure that elections are conducted in a fair, transparent and accountable manner.

Corruption that has stalled thousands of projects across the country, stolen money that could improve health and education, diverted resources that could be invested in agriculture and other job-generating sectors of the economy is not going to be reduced by amending the Constitution to create the position of prime minister and two deputies. On the contrary, these will be merely additional levers to be manipulated by corruption.

And so it is that instead of confronting this truth and dealing with it, President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga are foisting an expensive campaign on Kenyans, only a few months before another campaign for a General Election.

You can count on Deputy President William Ruto, who opposes the move to change the Constitution, to make the contest mean and noisy. Ironically, it will be a campaign that leaves Kenyans more divided than united as it has been framed as a contest between “wheelbarrownomics versus choppers”.

If the President believes that his handshake with Mr Odinga will be his enduring legacy to peace because it has united the country, he is about to discover just what a fallacy that is.

[email protected], @tmshindi)