To other East Africans and, indeed the rest of the world that do business with Kenya, the draft constitution, if passed in the referendum this Wednesday, will not radically change the way things are done in the country.

However, while the words “radical reform” have been used in heated debate ahead of the referendum, the new constitution will certainly rearrange its politics in ways that only the Ethiopian constitution of 1994 did in the wider East African region.

Kenya’s food basket, the Rift Valley Province, has always been key to Kenya’s politics — from colonial times to post-Independence — but usually for the wrong reasons. The same is true as the country goes to a referendum on a new constitution.

Rift Valley is not just Kenya’s food basket, it is also the region where most of the flowers for the country’s lucrative export industry are grown.

And it boasts extensive tea plantations, spectacular tourism sites and resorts and a few remnant but rich white settler-owned farms and plantations.

What happens in the Rift Valley, therefore, has a noticeable impact on European consumers’ Valentine’s Day flowers and breakfast tea.

The most forceful voices against the proposed constitution are coming from that Rift Valley. They include former president Daniel arap Moi, and Higher Education Minister William Ruto.

Also, while opinion polls show that supporters of the draft constitution form the majority in all of Kenya’s eight provinces, the highest level of opposition to it is in the Rift Valley. If there is one province where the referendum vote could be lost, it is the Rift Valley.

The “No” or Red side, as they are officially known, are framing their objections around all manner of issues — land rights; the claim that the draft legalises abortion through the backdoor; and the fact that it has retained the kadhis’ courts.

But their real beef appears to be that the structure of a devolved government that the draft constitution proposes radically takes away the political and economic grip these politicians have had in the province, Kenya’s largest.

There was never a culturally cohesive Rift Valley Province geographically before the British colonialists came along.

Many communities that are to be found there today lived or criss-crossed through the place in years past, the most prominent being the pastoral Maasai.

They controlled the fertile plains of the vast region, dominating the agricultural tribes who were less “warlike.”

When the British arrived at the turn of the 20th century, it is this land they most coveted for settlement, which is why they called it the White Highlands.

To this end, they cajoled the Maasai into signing two very one-sided  “agreements” — one in 1904 and another in 1911 — that gave away the central Rift Valley plains around Naivasha and Nakuru and also the Laikipia plateau farther north.

Colonisation had caught the Maasai at a particularly vulnerable moment. Rinderpest had devastated their cattle herds, and a succession struggle between two sons of their laibon (spiritual leader) had degenerated into a civil war.

After that, the colonial authorities built the region as an area populated by different groups whom they collectively called the “Kalenjin,” mostly after the Second World War. Indeed, the word “Kalenjin,” according to one popular account, derives from a radio broadcaster who often used it (it means, “I tell you.”)

Kenya, Rhodesia, South Africa and Algeria were the only African countries where white colonial settlers put down deep roots and sought to run the show in perpetuity.

It is no accident that these were exactly the hotspots where bloody insurrections arose at different moments against the settler overlords.

In Kenya, it was the Mau Mau insurrection — based largely in Central Kenya though — that put paid to settler ambitions and forced the British government to accelerate self-government for the Africans.

When Independence came in 1963, the White Highlands were opened to African settlement through either a willing-buyer wiling-seller arrangement between individuals, or through government-backed settlement schemes initiated by then president Jomo Kenyatta on behalf of landless Africans.

Most of those who benefited — with a considerable leg-up from Kenyatta — were the Kikuyu from the central highlands, where they, too, had lost prime chunks of land to the settlers — who in turn had exploited the fact that the Kikuyu had lost their land to draft them as cheap labour in the White Highlands.

That said, other communities like the Kalenjin, Luhya and Kisii also benefited from the government-backed large-scale land transfers in the Rift Valley that followed Independence.

The Masaai, whom neither the colonial authorities nor their post-colonial successors cared to empower to take advantage of the changing situation, found themselves left out of this land scramble.

It is true that the politically connected and better economically endowed Kikuyu gobbled up very many of the settler farms that were on offer during the Kenyatta years.

They also put together “land-buying companies” through which they controversially bought out many a Kalenjin land speculator at knockdown prices.

The issue has been burning ever since Independence, not so much because of the land issue per se, but because Moi and fellow Kalenjin politicians kept alive the grievance as a perfect tool to mobilise their people politically and thus create a powerbase in the province.

The tactic worked under Kenyatta who, to quell the clamour for land among the Kalenjin, handed Moi the vice-presidency with an assurance that he would succeed him.

Upon becoming president in 1978, Moi not only severely curtailed land transactions in the Rift Valley, but also intensified the effort to extend Kalenjin political domination in the multi-ethnic province.

This is the background that informs Moi and his allies’ current opposition to the draft constitution.

The old one served them fine because Moi had gerrymandered constituencies and districts to beef up the numbers of Kalenjin MPs and administrative units in a way their true numbers did not justify.

Though the new draft constitution does not erase the gerrymandered constituencies and districts — to do so would have raised the hackles too early — it nonetheless enshrines two things that will permanently break the monopoly of power Moi and his fellow ethnic entrepreneurs have always used to exercise influence in the Rift Valley.

The first and most dramatic is the breaking up of provinces as political units by creating semi-autonomous counties.

The outcome of this is that the multi-ethnic Rift Valley, more than any other, will metamorphose into multiple counties that will no longer be beholden to a regional power centre in Eldoret, Moi’s base, but to Nairobi.

With that, the bigger Kalenjin project and the national power that structure enabled it to amass (it was where elections were won or lost in Kenya) will begin to come apart.

The second change is one that very few people, whether they support or oppose the constitution, fully appreciate yet.

The draft decrees that in future there must be a proportionate balance between size and population, whenever new parliamentary constituencies are created.

Since the myriad constituencies Moi created in the Rift Valley when he was in power had no methodical underpinning other than to reward districts loyal to him, the net effect of the proposed strictures on representation are going to affect these areas most.

The focus on Rift Valley matters is precisely because this is where opposition against the proposed constitution is concentrated.

President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga share the goal of rearranging the Rift Valley’s hold on national politics, but for different reasons.

Kibaki appears determined to break the cycle of political violence that targets Kikuyu migrants in the province whenever there are elections, as happened in 1992 and 1997. Also, the constitution will be Kibaki’s legacy, thus wiping out the stain on his political record from his controversial December 2007 election.

Though Odinga’s own Luo community get subjected to the same periodic violence, his urgency right now is to decisively clip the wings of a political rabble-rouser and former bigwig in his Orange Democratic Movement, who has become the most venomous voice against the proposed constitution, Kalenjin ally-turned-archfoe William Ruto, the Higher Education Minister.

But Raila is one of the country’s most calculating politicians, so if that were all, he wouldn’t be fighting so hard.

However, the high population growth over the past 20 years in Nairobi, Western Kenya and the Coastal areas, where he and his ODM have done well lately, secures his political future because these places will become constituency-rich.

All opinion polls show that those pushing for a new constitution will win a victory in the August 4 referendum. The “Yes” side has consistently been shown to have more than double the support of the “No” side.

“It will mark the end of the Moi era,” says Njoki Ndung’u, a member of the committee of legal experts that put together the draft.

By taking power and resources to the regions, the new constitution could unlock long-trapped energies that could see the return of the economic prosperity and competitiveness.