How fear and selfishness created mongrel Constitutions

Jomo Kenyatta and other delegates at Lancaster, London, 1962. [File, Standard]

Eleven years ago today, Kenyans gifted themselves a new Constitution. It was a gift well deserved, because for 30 years pro-reform activists and leaders had sacrificed their all, including their lives and limbs so that their motherland could indeed be free.

Today, as the gigantic flag on a raised ground at the historic Uhuru Park, flutters in the wind from all directions, it belies the rigidity with which successive regimes and administrations have responded to calls to draft it.

It had been 30 years of struggle marked by broken bones, shattered dreams, ruined and lost lives of veterans who were brave enough to challenge the system and tell their rulers that they deserved a better future.

This betrayal of the people's aspirations started right in the cradle of the first constitution, Lancaster in Northwestern England where the dreams of a free Kenya were sacrificed for political expediency by delegates.

When different groups of people met there in May 1962 to draft the Constitution, majority were driven by fear and came out more interested in safeguarding their interests instead of uniting for a better country

The disdained minister of state and colonial affairs, Henry Hopkinson, first Baron Colyton crystalised these fears in his contribution to the Kenya Constitutional Conference, 1962.

Jomo Kenyatta speaking during the Kenya Constitutional Conference, 1962. [File, Standard]

He talked of fears of minor communities in Kenya being dominated by the big ones, justifying the establishment of a federal system to checkmate the central government.

He also feared for the future of British expatriates and the right of British troops to continue using their bases in Kenya after the country became free. Asians too, he said, were frightened that they would be marginalised and excluded from national affairs.

And to buttress all this, the dominant political formations, Kenya Africa National Union (Kanu) and Kenya Africa Democratic Union (Kadu) lived in a perpetual state of war although they were supposed to work as a coalition government.

“The Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries, who are supposed to be working together during the week, go out over the weekends and abuse one another with unfailing regularity,” reported the minister for colonies.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge, and the dust is still settling after the aborted attempt to drastically change the 2010 Constitution, but still, the country’s destiny is, according to the politicians, tied to the Constitution which they have always been trying to alter to suit their schemes ostensibly on behalf of Wanjiku.

The Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) may have been thwarted by the Court of Appeal but this is not the end. The confusion and competition witnessed in 1962 still persists and politicians never tire of looking for excuses to mutilate the Constitution.