Our robust arms of government will promote accountability, spur growth

Former President Mwai Kibaki during the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution, on August 27, 2010. Our constitution remaking was spurred by the burden of institutional decay and malfunction. We earnestly revamped to fortify institutions. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Anyone dumping the constitutional gauntlet as representative of the people’s will and sovereignty cannot be effective.
  • To cure the sometimes inevitable grandstanding in power chases, constitutional organs are expected to invigilate against suffocation of public good by din of notorieties.
  • Bureaucracy extorting concurrence without adhering to a President’s spoken script stalls growth.

Nascent nations feature episodes of human struggle to affirm dignity.

At 52, Kenya is reinventing itself. Aspirations we adopted in 2010 after the blight of the 2007 post-election chaos express relief that our national rebirth is due.

We are restarting the independence crusaders’ manuscript. 

From the anti-colonial struggle to a struggle against post-colonial dictatorship, we now oblige to anchor the constitutionality that we succinctly pronounced.

Our constitution remaking was spurred by the burden of institutional decay and malfunction. We earnestly revamped to fortify institutions.

Separation of powers means checkmating a polity, not any branch undermining others. It behoves support for the common good.

To sabotage a President simply because you want to topple a regime is unpatriotic, and reckless.

And to dismiss outside critics just because you are in fort is unwise.

To cure the sometimes inevitable grandstanding in power chases, constitutional organs are expected to invigilate against suffocation of public good by din of notorieties.

The declaration of a new dispensation behoves the fostering bodies to amplify good governance and accountability.

Executive authority has been tempered; its powers decongested and spread or shared with Parliament, devolution and the Judiciary.

Of course all this is consequent to a dark past. From the outside lane, we could see a plethora of individual legislators and judges in days gone by who stood steadfast for the rule of law and constitutional democracy.

HIGHWAY OF FLATTERY
Opposite these, others slid into the annals of history with epitaphs of their complicity to the suppression of truth, theft of public assets and violation of human rights.

For the latter, how exactly do we often slide into such a trajectory?

Some officers think that their ethnic or party barons have a silent pact with them for blind surrogacy.

It is a stamp from the country’s dark past of totalitarianism that rewarded mediocrity with filthy perks and perquisites. 

Anyone dumping the constitutional gauntlet as representative of the people’s will and sovereignty cannot be effective.

He would see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.

Such a leader blunts the principle of integrity, and hurts the value to help institutions grow purposefully. 

The path of sycophancy and impunity is easy. It requires neither courage nor innovation, it scorns integrity.

In the 1960s, sycophants and charlatans set up an immoral schism between the founding fathers of this country, leading to an untidy political distrust between communities that has gone on to date.

In 1994, court jesters in the Hutu-led Rwanda puffed up a campaign to eliminate the minority Tutsi.

Philip Gouverech’s We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killed Together with our Families speaks of horrendous hallmarks of ethnic bigotry shamelessly ‘baptised’ in the church itself.

ACT OF PATRIOTISM

In hours, nearly a million innocents were massacred.

Does this sound strange? Maybe we have forgotten that we ourselves annihilated some in a church 2008.

In both cases, it is puppeteering that inspired evil. Yet we must forgive but never forge.

Blind loyalties propelled the Hitler-Mussolini and Franco axis in southern Europe, stagnating those countries for decades.

Africa is a rich poor continent, courtesy of the corruption cabals.

Great leaders shrug off lackeys. The Lincolnian book Team of Rivals by Doris Goodwin anecdotes the wisdom of leaders trusting the advice of their critics and their mistrusted sincere followers. 

Institutional leaderships frown upon cultisms.

Organs must remain faithful to constitutionalism. Supporting a country’s democratically installed leader to redeem a sorrowful status quo even when you belong to ‘loyal’ opposition is an act of patriotism.

To celebrate chicanery just because it is adjacent is to rob our heritage.

Isn’t it tragic when opposition chiefs protects their “own” questioned in matters ethics, yet unashamedly froth against the government to be of better stead?

Precisely because of this hypocrisy by the so-called government in waiting, we parliamentarians should hastily reoccupy the vanguard slot.

Bureaucracy extorting concurrence without adhering to a President’s spoken script stalls growth.

Unless the President has spoken to you espousing a different script, always go by his written word. That way, we boldly skim off dispensable political brokerage.

The Writer is MP for Mukurweini and co-ordinator of Boresha Katiba, a parliamentary initiative to amend the Constitution to ameliorate its operational costs