Referendum win offers hope for a new dawn

If, as widely predicted, Kenya gets a new constitution this week, it will be the only country in the region where the Cabinet is appointed from technocrats and professionals nominated from the private sector.

Kenya’s new constitution will also introduce a second chamber of parliament — 47 counties under a decentralised administration run by elected grassroots leaders — and a judiciary where judges are not appointed at the whims of the head of state.

Clearly, it is the most ambitious attempt to modernise the politics of East Africa’s most politically liberalised yet fragile democracy.

In order to be elected president, one must have more than half of the votes cast in the elections and at least 25 per cent of the votes cast in each of more than half of the counties.

The president can be impeached by parliament.

Within six months of its being adopted, Kenya will have a new chief justice and a new Attorney General, and all judges will be vetted afresh for competence and probity.

Scarred by the violence that erupted in the aftermath of the disputed elections of December 2007, the new constitution is what East Africa’s largest economy wants in order to return to its much-vaunted record of political stability.

New clauses have been introduced in the constitution to provide ample time for losers wishing to challenge presidential elections.

President Mwai Kibaki, who will not be seeking re-election in 2012, is staking his legacy on delivering the new constitutional dispensation, and has been on a whirlwind tour of far-flung areas of the country aggressively campaigning for the new constitution.

The oldest Member of Parliament in Kenya with a record of an uninterrupted incumbency in the legislature since 1962 — and having held high profile Cabinet positions like Finance, Health and Vice President under former president Daniel arap Moi — Kibaki must consider the violence that gripped the country after the disputed elections of 2007 as the biggest blot on his long political career.

Clearly, Kibaki has calculated that the new constitution is his best chance of putting Kenya on the path of violence-free elections and stable politics.

This backdrop explains why the president has lately dropped his laidback style of politics and opted to take the leadership of the referendum campaigns.

How, exactly, does the constitutional experiment in Kenya mean to reduce the political system’s proneness to electoral violence?

A closer look at the text reveals an attempt by framers of the new constitution to tackle the “winner takes all” mentality that analysts have long identified as the root cause of political chaos in Africa.

The new constitution is a significant effort to deal with the problem of political patronage — the governance regimes where the Big Man and his cronies control the purse strings, doling out patronage resources to the elite of his ethnic community while starving ethnic groups that support the opposition of opportunities and resources.