Impeachment frenzy erodes confidence in our new democracy

The Jubilee Government is fighting to defeat two impeachment motions in the National Assembly.

One is an Opposition-sponsored motion to impeach President Uhuru Kenyatta for “violating the constitution” because the government has not executed a ruling by the Industrial Court that gave the country’s 288,060 teachers a colossal pay rise of 50-60 per cent.

The second is a motion sponsored by rebel Jubilee MPs to impeach the Cabinet Secretary for Devolution, Anne Waiguru, over alleged links to a corruption scandal involving the National Youth Service.

Impeachment is already drawing political blood. It is dividing the ruling coalition through the middle, unwittingly damaging Kenya’s democratic process and fuelling seething public discontent with Kenya’s new liberal constitution.

Kenya is one of the new democracies now facing the wrath of a growing and blistering global trend by hard-right opposition groups to turn impeachment into a political game.

A WEAPON OF CHOICE
Since the American President Richard Nixon was forced to resign his presidency to escape a sure impeachment, opposition zealots have tried to make impeachment a regular process of government.

Impeachment is now firmly a weapon of choice by weak opposition parties to stage “civilian coups” and remove democratic governments from power.

On September 1, 2015, President Jacob Zuma escaped an impeachment motion tabled by South Africa’s white-dominated Democratic Alliance (DA) accusing him of violating his presidential oath to uphold the constitution when his government allowed Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to leave the country after a country’s court ordered his arrest.

Last year, the Tea Party movement and other hard-right Republicans whipped the “impeach Obama” clamour to an ominous frenzy.

By adopting impeachment clauses, Africa’s new constitutions sought to check against gross violations of constitutions and acts of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours by the rulers, which bedevilled the one-party era.

In the light of this, article 145 of Kenya’s 2010 constitution provides for any member of the National Assembly supported by at least a third of the members to initiate an impeachment process against a president accused of gross violation of the law.

DIVIDE AND WIN
Although the law puts a high threshold for such impeachment — a two-thirds vote in Senate — impeachment has become an ideal mechanism of dragging national or county executives through the mud of politics.

By turning the impeachment mechanism into a weapon in intra-elite power games, Africa’s ethnic elite is perhaps wreaking more havoc on the nascent democratic processes than Europe’s fascists or communists a century ago.

Significantly, the raging impeachment debate in Kenya reveals deepening divisions within the Jubilee Coalition.

Primarily, impeachment has evolved into the sharpest instrument in use by rival factions within the ruling Coalition.

Apparently, Cord is merely preying on intra-Jubilee schisms as part of its divide-and-win strategy in 2017.

Meanwhile, soothsayers in the echelons of Jubilee power are insisting that the President is secured by the coalition’s “tyranny of numbers” in the House (167 of the 349 seats).

But losses by the government in strategic appointments and motions since March reveal the shakiness and fluidity of this “tyranny”.

What particularly makes the impeachment strategy subtle and deadly is an incipient and cover unity between former allies in ODM/Cord and the URP in a new offensive against TNA.

DIFFERENT MANIFESTATIONS

Jubilee’s impeachment crusaders in URP come in two shades.

On the one end is a group, seemingly led by the Nandi Hills legislator Alfred Keter, which has underwritten a motion to impeach the Cabinet Secretary for Devolution, Ms Anne Waiguru, linking her to a Sh792 million scandal in the NYS. But the motion also casts a long shadow on Kenyatta.

In the corridors of Jubilee power, Keter is parodied as “a mole for Cord” and as “speaking for the dark forces.”

One ubiquitous theory is that Keter’s motion is a diversionary tactic by Cord to stem the campaign on the ICC being waged by Gatundu South MP Moses Kuria, which links some Cord’s bigwigs with “fixing” Deputy President William Ruto, now facing trial at the Hague.

Another theory is that Keter is hardly a lone ranger. His motion is a soft front for an ironclad political offensive by URP stalwarts.

Unsurprisingly, some MPs allied to URP have already signed to the motion, claiming that their party has not been treated fairly.

Arguably, the motion seeks to force Kenyatta’s hand to reinstate Cabinet secretaries allied to URP who have been out in the cold since March over alleged involvement in corrupt deals.

A LAUGHABLE ATTEMPT

The second group consists of URP stalwarts who claim that after Uhuru’s case at the International Criminal Court was dropped, the government abandoned Ruto.

This group has been cynically egging on the DP to run for the 2017 elections as a strategy to occupy State House and have his case with ICC dropped.

Opposition pundits are squeezing this view for any drop of political liquid. Cord has also called on the URP to back its impeachment motion to fast-track the rise of the DP to the top perch.

Recently, Prof Makau Mutua claimed that Ruto and URP were yearning for the impeachment motions “to deal with their woes in the ruling Jubilee.”

On his part, Ruto has lampooned the impeachment motion as “a laughable attempt by the opposition to get to power through a short-cut.”

Be that as it may, impeachment is yet another litmus test for Jubilee unity and the stable future of Kenya’s new democracy.