Follow the Constitution to avoid pitfalls in agitation for change

Goons loot Qaffe Point during anti-Finance Bill protest in Mombasa on July 2, 2024. [Kelvin Karani, Standard]

As we navigate our way through what has now gained notoriety as ‘’Gen Z Revolution”, we must do quick arithmetic to decipher that which must not be compromised even as we seek greater accountability.

One of the things that set a constitutional democracy apart from autocracy and/or anarchy is the constitutional order. It’s that order that fundamentally distinguishes us from the state of nature eloquently described by Thomas Hobbes as ‘Short, nasty and brutish’. The constitution as a rule book in a democracy sets out to define how to ensure that a polity is not consumed by anarchy at any one time.

Robert Greene postulates in his book, ‘Concise Laws of Human Nature’ that human beings “are inherently conniving and jealous”. Possibly why the constitution places on everyone, duty bearers and rights holders alike, the responsibility to defend, protect and preserve the constitution. This should help us see our own internal inconsistencies even as we attempt to, in good faith, build a better country and an even better democracy.

A cursory reading of article one of the constitution provides that the sovereign power belongs to the people. But the constitution also provides that the said power can only be exercised in accordance with the constitution. Sometimes in the course of our civic discourse, there is a posture that almost suggests that article one supplants all other provisions of the constitution.

The constitution envisages that in a country founded on the basis of plurality, we will at all times have competing ideas. Such competition, even the right to disagree is anchored in law. In common law jurisdiction, we call it right to dissent. In Kenya, we famously refer to it as article 37. The right to assembly, demonstrate, picket and petition.

Because of years of citizen’s disaffection and disappointment, it is quite alluring to talk of a revolution. In the history of political development, revolutions have in the long term helped form institutionalised democracy and principles of equality as with the case of the American revolution. The French revolution, for example, laid the solid ground upon which they built an impersonal state that is largely oblivious to the cleavages of neopatrimonialism.

In their wake and after years of imperfect work, we see polities that we can point at as models for democracy, save for the American exceptionalism in reverse post 2020. Those two revolutions fortified and expanded the rule of law in its two sister versions, the common law and civil law. But revolutions have always come at a huge human cost. This is not to say that anyone should be afraid of entertaining the thought of a revolution. If anything, we have all always reveled in the words of Thomas Jefferson that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

But Otto von Bismarck, the founder and first chancellor of unified Germany counsels us that “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise learn from the mistakes of others’’. In 2011, we had the Arab Spring that started in Tunisia, claimed Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, then smoked Gadhafi from a culvert before shaking Syria and Yemen.

Egypt came from the hands of Hosni to the hands of a religious fundamentalist organization called Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptian military then, in its wisdom deposed the brotherhood and in came Fattah al-sisi. The economic and financial crisis that Egypt finds itself today cannot find expression in the tongue of mortal men. Libya, a decade later, has become a playing field for some of the most egregious human rights violations. In Tunisia, their democracy is largely, in form only while still maintaining ties with the old regime.

With the far reaching changes already enacted by the president I am obliged to agree with Thomas Jefferson that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”  But we must be guided by the Constitution.

-Mr. Mwaga, Convenor Inter Parties Youth Forum. [e-mail]