Prof Makau Mutua, you must respect Uhuru Kenyatta as your President now

I salute you from across the ridges. I am not in the habit of rebuttals but your piece in the Sunday Standard of November 26 left me agape. Sir, as the saying goes; Fill your beer tumbler slowly else you will spill half of it by froth.

Those who read your column religiously as I do will quickly notice an almost atavistic negativity towards President Uhuru Kenyatta. You seem to hold entrenched grievance against the person of Kenyatta. In your article, you boldly declare that ‘the legality of an action doesn’t amount to its legitimacy.’ Granted, you are a Professor of Law but allow me room for corrective edification.

Sir, you are an expert in Law. I pretend to be an expert in human relations, and especially marriage. In Sociology, we proffer that the law must always be read in a social context because law essentially governs human relations and coexistences.

The most glaring paradoxical dissonance with your declaration that legality doesn’t amount to legitimacy is that of the variant types of legitimacy that Sociologists rely upon to authenticate coexistence, legal legitimacy happens to be the only absolute type. Allow me to use marriage as an illustrative paradigm. In Sociology, we authoritatively aver that a union only qualifies as a marriage on the basis of five pillars of authenticity namely legitimacy, intimacy, propinquity, altruism and congruence.

Back to the political, I find your declaration that President Kenyatta’s ascendancy to office on the basis of the Supreme Court ruling is illegitimate spuriously degenerative. As I have demonstrated using marital legitimacy, the only type of legitimacy that is absolute in the political arena is legal legitimacy. This is precisely what President Kenyatta has achieved by subjecting himself to the rigours of a Supreme Court pronouncement.

Allow me also to submit to you Sir, that in politics, no one has ever achieved optimal legitimacy. Even Nelson Mandela’s universal coronation as a global icon of statesmanship never quite won him absolute legitimacy. What did you ever do with your infamous crystal ball Prof? Or do you still peer into it privately and it showed you that legitimacy can only be achieved by an Odinga Presidency?

Prof, permit me an iota of rudeness in dismissing your negation of President Kenyatta’s legitimacy and educate you on the hallmarks of political legitimacy. To evaluate political legitimacy, we must always consider the five key tributaries that flow into the basin of governance namely the Republic, the State, the Country, the Nation and Government.

Even in the most mature democracies such as the USA is oft divided but this never diminishes its republic designation. Statehood everywhere in the world is irreparably polluted by wolf-in-sheep-skin kitchen cabinets but this has never blunted the pokes of state arrows that a head of state holds in his quiver. Governments across the globe are saddled with the yoke of inefficiency and corruption but this has never reversed their legitimacy as the instruments of service delivery.  

As we speak, Kenyatta has just been legitimately authenticated as President of Kenya. The only tributary of legitimacy that begs questions of his presidency is that of nationhood. This is the only poke of legitimacy that is half-missing from his presidency and which he has declared as his priority.

- The writer is a Senior Sociologist at the University of Nairobi.