The race for the next occupant for the government house on the hill is in full swing and as everything else in Kenya the contest has already elicited sufficient drama . For starters , it is a bizarre two horse race escorted by over fifty nondescript donkeys .
It beats logic why a Kenyan , of sound mind , would imagine that a presidential campaign consists of registering ones name and placing a few strategic posters around the country and then taking off to Dubai to continue with whatever illicit business they engage in , while waiting for August .
We seem to have missed an important provision in the qualification of potential candidates for the presidency , the one on mental health . We however do assume that the freedom to dream is somehow enshrined in the constitution hence the many crackpots taking a shot at the presidency .
Talking about the constitution , it is becoming increasingly apparent that it does not really matter who will win the presidential contest this coming August since an individual will definitely occupy that house but the biggest loser will not be his opponent but democracy .
When a high ranking government official made the comment that the next parliament will be full of thieves , miscreants and ‘ wash wash ’ conmen , it should have been enough reason for us to panic but as the saying goes , the electorate will get the leaders they deserve .
The Kenyan Parliament has slowly become a gangster paradise since the institution has become an attractive destination for known crooks . Since we also seem to have very weak vetting processes for that august house then the best place for crooks to hide in Kenya is in the open .
Far too many things seem to be wrong in Kenya today and the touted tenets of democracy seem to be failing spectacularly and the political scene seems rudderless and on a free fall . Thugs in suits seem to be running the country which is at war with itself .
Kenya is going through an unprecedented assault on democracy and we should be sufficiently alarmed and start asking ourselves the hard and uncomfortable questions of where we went wrong and currently all enquiries seem to point to the constitution .
If we agree that a constitution is a body of fundamental principles according to which a state is governed , then if a country is being misgoverned then the obvious place to start looking at the breakdown is to interrogate the constitution .
From a historical viewpoint the main aim of our constitution was to pare down the imperial powers of the presidency . So in our wisdom we overhauled a whole Mercedes engine to correct a faulty braking system and ended up with an underpowered Nissan station wagon .
A constitution should be a document based on common sense and the needs of a country at a particular time but envisaging the future as it should evolve . For a country that got its first constitution from a country with no written constitution we should have been a lot more attentive .
The constitution was written with the democratic ideal in mind that the will of the people finds expression through representation . If the type of representation we envisaged was tribal then we should have stated as such in the document .
We have ended up with a tribal hegemony of the larger tribes yet the avowed intent was to create a unified Kenyan State where the most talented Kenyans would find their way into national leadership and steer the country to greater economic development .
Those charged with writing the new constitution were more interested in drafting a sound legal monument rather than an economic and political document that would unite Kenyans as a country while uniformly developing the country as a unit .
So although we have a document that has been touted as one of the most progressive constitutions in Africa in legal terms it has largely failed the Kenyan Society and since the drafters , believing in their infallibility , made all sections virtually impossible to alter .
In the clamor to launch the new constitution , the political heat in the country was whipped up by the politicians to a level that although we knew the document was incomplete and had some glaring faults we passed it anyway and hoped for the best .
Those that were at the Bomas consultative meetings will remember that it was never the intention to use the then 46 existing districts as the building structure for the counties since it was evident even then that you would be building tribal enclaves .
The idea floated and generally accepted was that the existing eight provinces except Nairobi would be split into two to create 15 counties . A county was intended to be an economic bloc that would address the devolution of resources to the grassroots .
Since previous presidents had used our voting pattern to punish particular areas who did not vote for them it was necessary to separate the national executive and the county executive hence the governors who would be directly voted in by the people .
The idea was then to create over time new counties as per economic dictates to ensure that no county became too large , from an economic point of view to be effectively managed . To cap such creations someone innocently added a proviso to a maximum of 47 counties .
Astute politicians saw the personal opportunity and blackmailed everyone by threating not to pass the document unless the 47 counties were identified and operationalized . If due process had been followed the Kenyan economy would never have been able to sustain more than 20 counties .
As it transpired when the constitution was passed the politicians went laughing all the way to the bank while Wanjiku was left holding the financial baby . Many counties are economically unviable and a drain to the national coffers , devolution was not
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In reality the person driving the country ’ s agenda is the MCA , the least qualified politician in our system and if you get the feeling that the country may be on autopilot could be because the country is actually being run by touts and carwash operators .