Arrest this situation before it is too late
Mr Joseph ole Lenku during the Parliamentary departmental committee meeting on security at County Hall on October 28, 2014. PHOTO | DIANA NGILA |
What you need to know:
- Voices calling for the resignation of the Cabinet Secretary for Internal Security, Mr Joseph ole Lenku, and the Inspector-General of Police, Mr David Kimaiyo, have intensified.
- As the nation waits for that unlikely day when Mr Lenku and Mr Kimaiyo will do the honourable thing and resign, an opportunity for our President and our members of Parliament to demonstrate active leadership presents itself.
It is the French lawyer and political philosopher, Charles de Montesquieu, who said: “There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.”
Montesquieu may have uttered those words at a time now hailed in history as the Age of Enlightenment, but his words ring relevant in present-day Kenya.
Rampant insecurity has fuelled fury and agitation in many a Kenyan national. From crude, lustful men stripping women in the streets to armed militia raining terror on innocent travellers, the gory news headlines are becoming more and more unsuitable for human taste.
The nation’s leaders have chosen to abdicate their responsibilities, but not their fat remuneration packages.
Voices calling for the resignation of the Cabinet Secretary for Internal Security, Mr Joseph ole Lenku, and the Inspector-General of Police, Mr David Kimaiyo, have intensified.
However, the leaders calling for the resignation of the two officers seem to be better at talking about it at public rallies and gatherings than invoking clause 152 (6) of the Constitution of Kenya, which allows “a member of the National Assembly, supported by at least one-quarter of all the members of the Assembly, to propose a motion requiring the President to dismiss a Cabinet secretary.”
POWER TO SACK
If the member is supported by at least a third of the members of the House, then a select committee shall be set up to investigate the matter.
Should the select committee find a Cabinet secretary unfit for public service and should the resolution be adapted by a majority of members in the National Assembly, then the Speaker, according to clause 152 (10), shall promptly deliver the resolution to the President, who shall have no option but to dismiss the Cabinet secretary.
The President also has the power to sack a Cabinet secretary.
As the nation waits for that unlikely day when Mr Lenku and Mr Kimaiyo will do the honourable thing and resign, an opportunity for our President and our members of Parliament to demonstrate active leadership presents itself.
It comes as no surprise that they are not applying the law for the good of the nation. When did they ever? Impunity has become the yardstick for governance in this country.
With a constitution as elaborate as Kenya’s, we should not be wallowing in oblivion, like sheep without a shepherd.
APPLYING THE CONSTITUTION
Our leaders ought to apply the articulately worded provisions in our Constitution.
American mathematician Edward Lorenz theorised a case known as the Chaos Theory.
Lorenz talked of a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system resulting in large differences in a later state, a phenomenon he referred to as the Butterfly Effect.
The term was coined from an example scientifically linking the occurrence of a hurricane to an event such as, say, the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier.
Lesser, selfish evils of past days have brought us here. How will our future be if or when bigger evils assail us? Let us not allow the butterfly to flap its wings lest we have to deal with a frightening hurricane soon.
