The decision
of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Constitution to adopt a
purely presidential form of government for the revised draft
constitution, while certainly coming as a surprise to most, must
nonetheless be heralded as a very important step towards achieving
transformational change in our political organization as a nation.
If adopted by parliament, and ultimately by the people, in the impending referendum, this singular provision on the structure of the executive arm of the government will prove to be the key to providing for a rational, stable and highly effective political system.
Whatever the intrigues that may have attended the achievement of this consensus, and it's safe to say that there may have been quite a bit of it, the members of the PSC deserve to be congratulated for taking this bold and decisive step in this process that we all hope will deliver a truly progressive document to us and our future generations.
Being a supporter of the presidential system as our best option of the three that had been proposed, and not always being inclined towards cynicism when it comes to the motives of human beings, I am predisposed to believing that when faced with the decisive choice, when it came down to it, the men and women of the PSC were able to rise above ego and narrow interests and allow themselves to be guided byreason and the weight of consequence to making what history will prove was the right decision.
If this proposal passes the tests that await it, the fact that the crass factionalism that has characterized Kenyan politics in recent times will not have stopped us all from making the right decision about our collective future will not be gainsaid in the annals of Kenyan history, and the memory of this committee's bold act will be right in the middle of it. This I wholly believe, and so kudos to them.
If, as I am inclined to believe, reason was the predominating factor in their deliberations on this question, then the members of the PSC must, for me, have realized two things above all.
First, that the task before them called for a wholly open, objective and practical analysis into the best means of providing for effective, stable and accountable government given our political culture and our society's unique characteristics. This in itself entails appreciating how these unique characteristics have interacted with our forms of social and political organization to produce the inefficient and degenerate mediocrity that we wish to rid ourselves of.
Now, the political organization of any large society is an inevitable fact of modern civilization. That's because political organization provides the best means of harnessing the whole of a society's collective resources to achieve common ends.
Within this understanding, politics becomes the process of deciding on a society's priorities. If a society is politically organized as an oligarchy,then the process of deciding on that society's priorities is restricted to a few people. If it is organized as a plutocracy, then the process is restricted to only the rich. If as a fascist or communist state, then that responsibility falls to a strong and imperial central government run by a hierarchical cabal of men on top of whom may or may not sit an all powerful dictator. And so on.
But if a society is to be organized as a democracy, then the ultimate responsibility of deciding on what its priorities ought to be, falls on the people. In a democracy the people are the ultimate deciding power.
As we all know, implementing a pure democracy, where the people can decide on everyresource allocation and policy issue is an impractical thing, even in today's world of super fast and interconnected communication systems. As a result, democracy has been practiced everywhere in the modern world through a system of representation and delegation that we call republicanism.
In republicanism, the people make their decision through elections, conferring and delegating the power to implement their decisions on a group of people acting within institutions and the laws that govern these institutions and their interaction with one another. No matter the form of republicanism, presidential, parliamentary, or hybrid, federal, devolved or unified republic, the primary purpose of modern day republican government is to implement the people's decisions in a timely, effective, and accountable manner. That is the essence of political organization. Now, given this, how are we to assess the Kenyan context in deciding which form of republicanism is best suited for our society?
That the people of Kenyan have always desired to be politically organized as arepresentative democracy can be considered a foregone conclusion. However, the ultimate form of republican government which we have practiced for the last forty-six years has not been well suited to the protection of the people's interests, and has instead engendered inefficient and degenerate mediocrity.This form of government has been characterized by hybridism and an over-concentration of power in the executive, particularly in the presidency.
In this structure power has been promoted as an end. Politics has not been practiced in the interests of the people, but in the interests of power; for with power all forms of degenerate impunity have been enabled and even sanctioned. As a result the people's development agenda have been largely undermined in the clamor for power.
Now, it has been well argued that the main fault in this form of government has been the concentration of powers in the presidency. The powers of the presidency have conferred both license and political pre-eminence to the holders of that office. The two men who have occupied that office in the past have abused that power and influence to corruptly enrich themselves and their cronies unimaginably, and have run government and state business with whim and caprice, this both as a means of maintaining a veneer of political inscrutability and of consolidating their hold on power.
The motive, then, for wanting to claw back the powers of the executive and to institute accountability mechanisms is well understood and shared by everyone.
But we, as the people, would be remiss in our decision to reform this institution if we saw the presidency as bearing the sole responsibility for everything that has been wrong with our political organization. After all, all the men who have to date occupied that seat have been products of our society, influenced by it every bit as much or as little as everyone one of us.
They distinguished themselves in our political realm, received our admiration and support, came to power legitimately, and were enabled in their folly either by our acquiescence, ignorance, sycophancy,depraved self-interest, all of the above, and so on. Sure, once in power their pre-eminence has meant that their 'style' has largely helped to define the political culture, but it has nonetheless been a culture that has been larger than any one of them, one that has evidently managed to outlive their time in office as demonstrated by the persistent influence of such things as crass materialism, petty rivalries, tribalism and ethnicity, the penchant for jingoism and demagoguery, and so on, all of which have worked to engender mediocrity, corruption and impunity.
For me, then, the desire to want to reform our political institutions must go hand in hand with the desire to want to reform our political culture.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
