Tag Archives: kenneth Marende

The new constitution and patronage politics in Kenya

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Former president Moi infamously liked warning voters that siasa mbaya maisha mbaya (bad politics leads to a bad life). This was code for vote for the opposition and no roads, no schools and no hospitals for you.

The framers of the new Kenyan constitution must have particularly disliked the power of the presidency in doling out development money and other patronage largesse. According to the Daily Monitor (Ugandan Daily):

“From 2012, it is likely to have the most limited presidency in Africa. The president has only about 10 per cent of the budget to dole out his patronage and fund his pet projects. The bulk of the rest are fixed; both by a constitutional cap, and a negotiation process.”

It will be interesting to see how the Kenyan presidency evolves following this revolutionary clipping of its powers. Already the executive has seen its powers watered down by an increasingly powerful parliament. To reinforce this trend, the judiciary has just seen the appointment of a card carrying reformer as Chief Justice. A powerful judiciary will provide a check not only on the presidency but on the wider executive branch as well – especially the now independent and obscenely corrupt Kenyan ministries.

Credit for the relatively more limited presidency also goes to President Kibaki.

Many forget that for a long period of time Kibaki governed with Moi’s constitutional powers. It is a relief that the limited presidency will now be both de facto and de jure, especially because there are way more Mois than Kibakis vying for the presidency in 2012.

A word of caution, though. Institutions are not automatic fixes to problems of governance. They are like incomplete contracts that have to be reinforced by numerous conventions and “gentleman agreements.” The Kenyan political elite may yet find ways to circumvent the spirit of the new constitution.


new lows for Kenyan politics

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The battle lines have been drawn for a showdown in the Kenyan parliament tomorrow. Most reasonable Kenyans, including the current Chief Justice, the Attorney General (Mr. Kibaki’s government legal adviser) and Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs oppose the move by a faction allied to Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto to censure the speaker and shove president Kibaki’s questionable nominations to constitutional offices down Kenyans’ throats.

The media owners association, the Law Society of Kenya, and most of the Kenyan civil society have also rejected the unconstitutional nominations.

I have defended President Kibaki numerous times. I believe that it is because of his leadership style that Kenyans have experienced a resurgence of self-confidence that had long been lost after the fiasco that was 1966.

That said, I find his present actions deplorable. President Kibaki has chosen to risk plunging Kenya back into the abyss because of two of his lieutenants who masterminded the chaos that killed 1300 Kenyans and displaced hundreds of thousands. President Kibaki has chosen to spend public money and resources in defending this same duo. President Kibaki may also have been aware that state resources were used by his second wife and daughter to facilitate drug-trafficking. I stand disillusioned. For far too long I saw in the son of Othaya a Mang’u Man above petty the politics and mediocrity that characterizes Kenya’s political class. I may have been wrong.

The Kenyan presidency has been hijacked by Messrs Francis Muthaura and Uhuru Kenyatta. My only hope is that as they begin their descent for their sins from 2007-8 they do not take the rest of Kenya with them. I also hope that Mr. Kibaki will listen to the rest of Kenya, including the many bright legal minds allied to him, and rescind his wapende wasipende nominations.

His co-principal Mr. Odinga should also show some restraint and engage in grown-up politics. Engaging in a food fight with Mr. Kanyatta will not do Kenya any good.

Macharia Gaitho of the Daily Nation writes:

The crude personalised attacks both are displaying illustrate the depths to which Kenyan politics has sunk. Prime Minister Odinga and Deputy Prime Minister Kenyatta are demonstrating that they are truly the sons of their fathers.

They are privileged scions of the political and mercantile elite who got the best education money could buy and the richest heirlooms that could come out of public service, but when cornered, they abandon all pretence at cosmopolitan sheen and retreat to atavistic and crude ethnic demagoguery.

The saddest thing is that it might not just be a fight between two spoilt and overgrown brats, but a much wider one that carries their respective communities along.

The ordinary Luo or Kikuyu stands to gain absolutely nothing by hoisting Mr Odinga or Mr Kenyatta to reach the fruit. That fruit will not be shared, but kept within the family, as amply demonstrated by Kenyatta and Odinga Mark 1.

Yet you can bet that when it comes to reactions to the current Odinga-Kenyatta brickbats, it is the ordinary and downtrodden Kikuyu and Luo who will be incited to come out most rabidly in support of their man.

is kenya at last getting limited government?

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On Thursday Speaker of the Kenyan Parliament Kenneth Marende ruled that President Kibaki’s appointments to constitutional offices were unconstitutional. The politics of the decision aside (it is a war between Premier Odinga and others intent on succeeding Mr. Kibaki in 2012) it is a good sign that finally Kenya may have gotten a system of political balance of powers. No single faction appears to be able to do whatever it wants, wapende wasipende.

Scholars like Nobel Laureate Douglas North, Barry Weingast (of my Department), among others, have argued that limited government (in which centres of power balance each other to prevent tyranny) is one of the key ingredients in the quest for long-run Economic growth and political stability.

Kenya appears to be on the threshold of obtaining limited government. It began with President Kibaki’s laid back approach to governing which empowered centres in the political structure outside of the presidency. Raila Odinga, William Ruto, Uhuru Kenyatta, Martha Karua etc are all politicians who have elevated themselves to an almost equal footing, politically speaking, with the president himself.

And the change has not just been about personalities, typical of politics in Africa. Institutions have had a hand in it, too. The Kenyan parliament – which Barkan thinks is the strongest in SSA – with its committee system and relative autonomy from the executive has been at the forefront of checking the powers of the executive in general and the presidency in particular. The new constitution reflects this new equilibrium condition.

The new constitution also empowers the judiciary, previously seen as a rubber stamp institution in the pocket of the president. Although nominations to the institution has gotten off on a rocky start, it appears that the law society of Kenya and the Judicial  Service Commission might be strong enough to (self)regulate judges on the bench, regardless of who appoints them.

I am cautiously optimistic.

The evolution of parliamentary sovereignty in kenya

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It is an interesting time as far as the institutions of governance in Kenya are concerned. The country is seeing the entrenchment of parliamentary sovereignty. Real power in the country is slowing but surely shifting from the executive to the legislature. Kudos to KBC and the parliamentary authorities for allow this to happen.

I am of the humble opinion that democracy is meaningless without credible de facto (as opposed to de jure) mechanisms for horizontal accountability. Elections (vertical accountability) take place only every five years, and even then votes, in most places, are oftentimes easily bought with bags of maize and sugar. The real game remains restricted among the political elite.

Democracy is only stable and productive to the extent that elites can check each other and agree to a modus vivendi. That is how democracy emerged in post civil war England. That is how it has been sustained in most of the West (even during periods of limited suffrage). And that is how it will take hold in Africa.

The trick is to end the one-man-show syndrome that has characterized African politics for decades. Kenya is making that crucial transition as power sips from Ikulu to Bunge and from Harambee Avenue to Parliament Road (more on the causes soon).

Let’s not kid ourselves that horizontal accountability equals democracy. It is not. But my contention is that it is better simply because the tyranny of 210 is, to me, definitely more palatable than the tyranny of 1.

Marende needs to do more

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Kenyan parliamentarians are the highest paid in Africa. Indeed, the 222 members of the August House make more than US senators do in a year. Quite a job they have.

All they have to do now is do their job right. According to a Parliamentary Powers Index the Kenyan parliament has a score of 31%. The same score as Mauritania and Zimbabwe and lower than places like Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. Even the Sierra Leonean parliament did better than Kenya on this index. This index is not the final word on parliamentary performance, but Marende and his team could be doing a better job. A stronger committee system, better laws, more transparency of parliamentary procedures and less sleaze could be good places to start.

A higher score on the index is clearly correlated with better government, with members of the OECD up top. Wake up Marende and Co.

Due credit to: M. Steven Fish and Matthew Kroenig, The Handbook of National
Legislatures: A Global Survey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

it is time more districts translated into wider taxation

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President Kibaki has created about 180 districts over the last 6 years. The logic behind the creation of the many districts, according to the president and his men, has been that there is a need to bring government services closer to the people. One obvious question then is what government services? Are we talking about registration of births and deaths, motor vehicle registration, licensing, issuance of title deeds, judicial services and all that stuff? Because these services are still mostly highly centralised, requiring one to travel either to Nairobi or to far off provincial headquarters. Critics of the new districts have oftentimes highlighted their high cost and non-viability (The president thinks such critics are “backward”).

It was therefore welcome news when yesterday the president announced the halting of the creation of new districts – citing financial reasons. For some reason this fact (high costs) never crossed the minds of the president’s advisers somewhere between new district # 1 and # 180.

And now that we have over 180 new and expensive districts – most of them dished out for political reasons and “people’s demands” – I think it is time we require the new districts, being local governments, to do what governments do: TAX EVERYONE. Each district should be required to raise a percentage of its expenses from local populations (it is quite unfair for Nairobians to pay for non-viable districts in remote parts of the country created purely for political reasons). This minimum requirement need not be uniform across the board – people in West Pokot need districts too, you know – but should be geared towards making local people bear some responsibility for their local governments. With local funding for local districts, Kenyans may be persuaded to care more about who gets appointed to be DC and what their DC and the many district committees do. And to add to the positives, the DC’s will have an incentive to promote local economic activity to generate revenues.

Eventually, one hopes, this idea of local taxation for local services will make Kenyans demand that they get to elect their local DC’s instead of having State House appoint them.

This may sound like a pipe-dream but there is hope. Given parliament’s increasing assertiveness and power-grab from the executive and judiciary it is conceivable that such an idea can successfully be passed into law by the august House. Does someone know a crafty MP with nothing to lose who can champion this cause?

ps: I never thought I’d ever say this but I am actually missing the Standard online edition. What happened to them? Can’t they afford a website?

transparent budget making

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The Nation’s Editorial has a piece against the idea of MPs managing the budget. I am a bit ambivalent on this one. On the one hand I am apprehensive about the idea of men like Maina Kamanda and Jakoyo Midiwo and Chirau Makwere deciding on what the government should be doing with tax payers’ money. These men (and quite frankly almost the entire lot in parliament) have proven to be myopic populists who will stop at nothing to gain short term political capital. If this plan goes through, we can expect pork-laden budgets and beyond-means-spending.

That said, I don’t think the idea itself is bad. What could be better than to take the power to allocate national resources from conceited bureaucrats at treasury? For far too long we have allowed the Finance Minister and State House to use the allocation of national resources as a political tool for patronage and for narrow tribal interests. Spreading this role to the entire legistlature may bring us a more equitable distribution of national resources for the good of all Kenyans.

That’s my two cents on this.

kenneth Marende elected speaker

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The Kenyan opposition candidate Kenneth Marende has been elected speaker of the National Assembly. This is could be a glimpse of things to come in the country’s tenth parliament where the opposition has a majority over the government. By electing their own candidate for the speaker, the opposition has proven that it has full control of the house and will challenge the government through legal means over the disputed Dec 2007 elections.

The government candidate, long serving former speaker,  Francis Ole Kaparo, lost by four votes. The total tally of the votes was 105 against 101.