At the beginning of June, I read that the government of Kenya, for several months, has been in the process of preparing structures for a national dialogue conference to discuss the challenges facing the country. My understanding has been that there is bipartisan support for this proposal.
By definition any such conference will be one that is of, by, and for Kenyans. However, as a friend of Kenya since its independence, I offer a few thoughts about what such a conference might look like and try to accomplish, for I think it has the potential to be of immense and lasting value for Kenya. At the same time, there are challenges and risks in raising hopes and expectations through a conference like this. Citizen cynicism about initiatives like this, if they are not seen to lead to tangible benefits can be corrosive of the very institutions need to bring about those positive changes.
A Kenya national dialogue conference will both replicate and, at the same time, be relatively innovative in the post-Cold War democratic experience of sub-Saharan Africa. In some respects, the Kenya conference will be in the same vein as the national conferences that sparked democratic momentum in West Africa, the most successful of which took place in Benin and in Mali. Each of those conferences brought together citizens from a wide variety of walks of life to refresh and reform political life. As a result of those conferences, to all appearances and by most measures both countries became pacesetting sub-Saharan African democracies for the subsequent two decades. But Mali’s meltdown in 2012 and its continuing long struggle to recover have dramatized an important truth. Unless agreements forged at conferences like these in newly democratic countries are implemented, and the political commitment to sustain them maintained, not only democracy but the political health of the state itself can be endangered.
Kenya’s planned national dialogue conference will be different from these earlier national conferences because it will come years after transitions to democracy have occurred, in the case of Kenya, after the passage of the 2010 Constitution. Thus, the conference is likely to occur at an opportune moment, when the shortcomings and unmet agendas of the initial democratic transition, as well as its successes, will be apparent. The conference can be a unique and valuable opportunity to recognize these shortcomings and to address them by building on achievements already realized. Evident flagging democratic momentum across the continent has been more widely noted than adequately explained. Kenya’s conference could be path-breaking in both substantive and process terms. It prove an effective democratic means of recognizing, diagnosing, and prescribing remedies for potentially serious political and socioeconomic ills to date before metastasize into full-blown crises.
Some of the early conferences were of particular significance because they established broadly acceptable terms as foundations for democratic governance before the first competitive multi-party elections of the democratic era. This was the case especially in southern Africa, in Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, and, more narrowly, in Mozambique. A good case can be made that post-Cold War democratic transitions at least got off to better starts where countries and people established what they agreed upon as the basis for democratic states before they launched initial multiparty elections highlighting what remained contentious.
It may be fair to observe, however, that in focusing in these earlier transitions on the problem of establishing majority rule through imminent legitimate, free, and fair elections, some longer term and deeper problems have received less attention than they deserved. On the one hand, to some extent, an implicit premise of these transition conferences appears to have been that other important dimensions of democracy would occur to the extent that electoral processes met these high standards. That has been less the case than participants, and some academic students of democracy expected, and may still expect. It has been no secret that establishing the rule of law, judicial independence, viable political parties, effective legislatures, and viable sub-national governments have remained variably slow to emerge twenty-five years into sub-Saharan Africa’s democratic era.
On the other hand, a fundamental important, deeper, longer term problem has become more apparent in hindsight than it was earlier. Constitutional reforms in sub-Saharan Africa’s democratic era may not have enabled peoples and communities to reach consensus on bases for sharing membership in states that has been broad enough and deep enough to counterbalance what they disagree on, even where these constitutional reforms have been effected relatively democratically.
I suggest that these two sets of problems may be closely interwoven, that Kenya has deeply experienced both, and that the anticipated national dialogue conference could establish a model venue for addressing these two problems and their interconnections, for other new democracies in Africa and elsewhere as well as for Kenya. Structuring a national dialogue conference in order to make these mid-course corrections effectively will require imagination, innovation, and real vision as well as consummate organizational prowess.
On the one hand, Kenya has conducted a dozen national elections and two constitutional referenda in its democratic era. I believe it generally recognized both that technical and organizational improvements have been made and that further refinement is still required. It took twenty years and more for electoral processes, supported by energetic civil society advocacy, to achieve the 2010 Constitution, widely recognized as a model document. Implementation is ongoing, incomplete, and to some extent contentious.
On the other hand, Kenya’s relatively peaceful 2013 national and county elections took place against the background of markedly uneven progress in meeting the array of serious issues, identified in Agenda 4 of the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation project. These are the issues identified by Kofi Annan and the Panel of Eminent Personalities as underlying dimensions of the country’s 2007-2008 meltdown, triggered by the serious election irregularities. Constitutional review was one of these which has been accomplished. But on others little progress has been made. While it is noteworthy that these largely unaddressed issues, which the Fund for Peace has identified as key dimensions of state weakness did not disrupt the 2013 elections, it is also the case that more democratic process under the new Constitution have not produced much progress in addressing these potentially destabilizing core socioeconomic and political issues. Of these the most daunting and challenging include land issues which are too big and complex to solve though have festered for more than half a century and have erupted during elections. Others have included youth unemployment, poverty, inequality and regional imbalances
The anticipated Kenya National Dialogue Conference can be a timely and fortuitous opportunity to examine candidly, comprehensively, and creatively how it may be possible to address these and other unmet Agenda 4 challenges. It might work where other venues have not succeeded and indeed might be a last best chance to making fundamental progress. For the conference to succeed at this level, much will depend upon how it is to be constituted. Bringing articulate representatives of local communities together with elected national leaders for an extended period in the tradition of Bomas conferences would be essential.
Email your news TIPS to Editor@nairobilawmonthly.com, and to advertise with us, call +254715061658 anytime of the day
