IEBC chair Wafula Chebukati’s standoffishness and casual approach to implementing Supreme Court guidance and reluctance to enforcing Chapter Six of the Constitution on ethics worrying . By Ouma Ojango Are you confident that the IEBC (Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission) is going to deliver a credible election come August 9 from what you have seen so far? As a voter in this month’s General Election, what would be your answer? Eric Latiff of KTN asked this critical question to Paul Mwangi, a legal advisor to Azimio La Umoja One Kenya Alliance presidential candidate in an interview last month. Avoiding castigating…
Author: NLM writer
None of the major political parties and alliances in the current election has put forward a clear vision for young people. Instead, the electorate has been treated to the traditional election campaign menu of implicit ethnic hostilities and the attendant fears of politically motivated violence. In the country’s last election in 2017, then 23-year-old university student Shikoh Kihika started a hashtag, #TribelessYouth, in response to hateful, discriminatory messages she saw on social media. In 2017, over a quarter of Kenya’s population was on social media. It’s likely that fake news and other online messages designed to stoke fear and ethnic…
While the outcome of this year’s elections will be extremely important to Kenyans, regardless of the outcome, the effects will be felt far beyond the country’s borders. Tens of millions of Africans will be watching to see how the elections are conducted. Will it be a truly free, fair, and nonviolent process, or more of the same? At the moment, all one can do is wait and see. Jean Mensa, chair of the Electoral Commission of Ghana, who headed a US Agency for International Development-funded pre-election assessment mission co-sponsored by the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, told the Ghana…
By Charles A Ray This month, Kenyans will cast their ballots for president, members of parliament, and members of the Kenyan senate. Incumbent ruling Jubilee Party President Uhuru Kenyatta has thrown his support behind opposition challenger, Raila Odinga, the prime minister who is a member of the Orange Democratic Movement, over his own deputy president, William Ruto. Given the history of election violence in Kenya, this has many worried. While ethnic conflicts have often been the engine of conflict in the past, economic inequities caused by official corruption and the destabilizing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to be…
By David Wanjala This month’s election is significant for two major reasons; it ends a mandatory two term tenure of a ruling President and two, which is perhaps more significant, pulls down the curtains on pioneer county governors that were lucky to have been reelected in 2017 to serve for two consecutive terms. The Constitution restricts the terms for governors, just like for the presidency, to two uninterrupted terms. Devolution was created by the 2010 Constitution to enhance equity in resource distribution, bring decision-making and service delivery closer to the people and enable the realization of the right to self-determination.…
When it comes to injecting morality into our politics, the Constitution has fared better than expected By Shadrack Muyesu Although decidedly good, the 2010 Constitution is a collection of lofty ambitions that are not Kenyan in any sense and therefore, on many accounts, impracticable. It is a skepticism I have long held and which continues to be justified by our difficulties in, inter alia, implementing the two-thirds gender rule a decade into the new constitutional dispensation and the failure of liberal democracy to solve our leadership crises. Yet, even my kind of skeptic has to admit that, when it comes…
Most prominently, the president has undone the Luo-Kikuyu rivalry that held Kenya hostage by uniting Kenya’s two most politically inclined communities By Ouma Ojango In 2013 and 2017, the Jubilee Government had probably the best campaign manifestos ever presented to the Kenyan electorate since independence. Yet, it is difficult to pinpoint President Uhuru Kenyatta’s legacy in the end of his ten-year leadership even as we know that he has endeavoured to deliver on some of the promises in his second term through the Big Four Agenda initiative. In their 2013 – 2017 manifesto dubbed ‘Transforming Kenya – Securing Kenya’s prosperity’,…
By Emmy Auma and Ivan Campbell As Kenya get into the home stretch of the general elections, there are some signs that the ethnicise political discourse and its underlying drivers are changing. As in so many countries around the world, this has been driven in part by the experience of COVID and the restrictions on people’s lives that have come with the pandemic, which have exacerbated and highlighted inequalities among Kenya’s citizens. Whether this ushers in a new and less violent form of politics remains to be seen. It may be that the new political dynamics will prove just as…
By Jill Ghai The strains between the current President and his Deputy have drawn much attention to the role of deputies. And perhaps it is in the light of this that both the front-runner candidates for president have set out plans for the role of their deputies if they are elected in August. And, of course, their choices of running mates (who would become those deputy presidents) have been intended to attract support from the communities to which those running mates belong. To promise to those running mates (and so to their communities) that if elected they will have really…
By Special Correspondent Kenya’s competitive presidential elections reflect hard-earned progress in establishing independent constitutional and judicial guardrails, though a history of electoral violence demands all sides show restraint. Kenyans will vote in their fifth presidential elections since the introduction of multiparty politics in 1991. The competitiveness of the elections, and uncertainty over the outcome, distinguishes Kenya from many of its neighbours. President Uhuru Kenyatta is stepping down, following the completion of his constitutionally limited two terms in office. This, too, makes the Kenyan elections noteworthy, given the recent trend of African leaders sidestepping term limits as a means of extending their time…
