Jubilee ought to tell us who is funding them, so must Cord

I recently came across an academic article from 2015 by John Harrington and Ambreena Manji of Cardiff University entitled Restoring Leviathan? The Kenyan Supreme Court, constitutional transformation and the presidential election of 2013.

It should be required reading for the entire Judiciary, the Judicial Service Commission and other constitutional commissions, the Executive and the legislature.

Every prospective candidate for the chief justice, deputy chief justice and Supreme Court, including current judges, should memorise it.

For it reminds us why we fought so long for a new Constitution and what its promulgation was supposed to mean.

Like the end of apartheid in 1994, our new Constitution was to herald a new beginning that would be totally different from our past where the Executive could not be challenged.

Sadly unlike the end of apartheid, the passing of the new Constitution did not come with new office bearers who owed their positions to it.

And so it came to be that the transformation articulated and envisioned by the Constitution was left in the hands of people who hated it, and who had benefited from the old one.

It is similar to ending apartheid but keeping FW De Klerk and his Nationalist Party in complete control.

One of the first signs of the disaster ahead was the purported appointments, unconstitutionally and unilaterally by President Mwai Kibaki, of Alnashir Visram as Chief Justice, Githu Muigai as Attorney-General and Kioko Kilukumi as Director of Public Prosecutions.

Transformation as designed in the new Constitution would have required the purported appointees to declare their fidelity to the Constitution by rejecting the appointments.

But, alas, it took massive public pressure, and a brave decision by Justice Daniel Musinga to halt the abuse of the Constitution.

VITAL INFORMATION

We have since corrected some of these deliberate missteps but the make-up of the Judicial Service Commission gives us cause to worry that the dismantling of the transformative aspects of the Constitution is ongoing.

This is especially so regarding the unilateral appointments of Winnie Guchu — former executive director of Uhuru Kenyatta’s TNA party — and Kipnegtich arap Korir — one of the favoured corporate men in the Moi era — to the JSC to ostensibly represent the “public interest”.

We can only guess which “public interest” they serve!

But perhaps one of the areas most in need of transformation is campaign and political party finance, which is the engine of corruption that Mr Kenyatta keeps vowing to eradicate.

MP Aden Duale is wrong and anti-constitutional when he argues that the financing of the launch of the new Jubilee Party is not the business of anyone but the members of Jubilee Party.

It is the business of ODM, and indeed of every Kenyan so that we can know who is getting what from funding the Jubilee Party launch.

And more so, if there are taxpayers funds, often hidden in slush accounts, included in funding the launch.

And similarly, ODM must inform us who is funding their campaigns and with what money.

It is not enough for them to demand answers from Jubilee, they must walk the talk and declare their sources and uses of funds.

Here is why this is crucial: Businesses and tenderpreneurs often contribute to the major parties, not because they believe in them, but to ensure that they can get a hearing and some contracts thrown their way after elections.

CAMPAIGN FINANCING

And the crafty businesses hedge their bets by contributing to both sides, just in case, though the incumbent always gets more than the challenger.

It is these same tenderpreneurs who then cascade all these scandals that we never seem to lay to rest.

Of course their “business” comes with kickbacks to the decision makers, which is one of the reasons that they bid so high: they have many hands to grease!

But this is all business as usual predating the Constitution. We did not handle this issue of campaign finance properly, particularly because the Independent Election and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) did not want to rock the boat as they persisted in their willful incompetence from the start to the end of the election.

But rather than depend of the IEBC, it is time for civil society to delve into this issue so we can allow the Constitution to have its rightful transformative effect.

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