Kenya’s ‘unEast African’ constitution and why it took so long

That was one of the devices used to win a majority in favour of it. If there is a constitution in East Africa that is a bribe to the voters, Kenya’s is it.

In addition, because of the country’s fractured political party system, many of the political players and interest groups booked their needs into the constitution because they were unsure they would ever have the clout to do so at a later stage.

This partly also informed the strident opposition by the evangelical and Catholic church leaderships to what they saw as underhand legalisation of abortion.

Though the politicians were urging them to support the constitution which is “90 per cent okay” and to wait to get the “10 per cent later” via amendments, in all probability they knew that that would be a very difficult thing to do once the new law passed.

Kenya has been working at getting a new constitution for more than 20 years, the longest such struggle in the world.

Only Burma, which took 17 years, comes close. If you spend 20 years rewriting and editing a document, you are likely to end up with a fairly decent final product.

And if, like the Freedom Corner women in Uhuru Park at the height of democracy agitation in Kenya, your main weapon of protest is to strip and frighten off superstitious police who think an old woman’s nakedness brings bad luck, then your struggles will take longer to come to fruition, than those of your Rwandan and Ugandan sisters who choose to take up the AK-47 instead.

In 2005, a battery of changes stripped away quite a few of the progressive elements in the 1995 Uganda constitution, including the two-term presidential limit.

Those types of reversal tend to happen to constitutions that are the result of quick victories.

If Kenya’s survives 10 years intact, then at least East Africa will learn that a good constitution needs to have the gestation period of an elephant.