Under the guise of giving the government the tools to fight
insecurity, the amended laws gives government wide and unchecked discretion in
defining what constitutes a threat and taking measures to mitigate against it.
It cuts a large swathe through constitutionally guaranteed rights to privacy,
fair trial, assembly, information, expression and thought as well as freedoms
from arbitrary detention and even torture, in a misguided attempt to respond to
rising incidents of insecurity including terrorist attacks. This atrocious
piece of legislation is just the culmination of a long period of Kenyan elites
undermining the foundations of liberal democracy in Kenya.
The fact is, while
the adoption of the new constitution should have heralded the democratisation
of government, the logic of tyranny was largely left intact. In Kenya, as elsewhere, the fight for freedom
has primarily boiled down to a struggle against the notion that government and
ruling elites know what’s best. From colonial times, the people in power have
disguised their oppression under a proclaimed special knowledge and patronising
parental concern for those they oppressed. The British claimed to govern in the
interests of the native population, to be the altruistic purveyors of
civilisation, even as they murdered, looted and repressed. However, it is plain
that many who led the struggle for freedom, did not themselves fundamentally
reject this idea. Successive post-independence governments similarly claimed to
be “baba na mama” to the Kenyans they were robbing blind and whose rights they
were trampling underfoot. For them, it was not oppression that was the problem,
but rather who it was doing the oppressing. Following their footsteps, in 2003
the late John Michuki, a former colonial enforcer reinvented as a minister in
the government of Mwai Kibaki which ended four decades of despotic KANU rule,
suggested that constitutional reforms were no longer necessary since the sole
objective had been to unseat the dictator, Daniel arap Moi. In fact, with Moi’s demise, the struggle ceased
to be about principles and increasingly became about power, and between those
who had it and those who wanted it. Many of the leading lights of civil society
and the church marched straight into government and into the annals of
corruption and kleptocracy. Not only was there a failed attempt to foist a
bastardized version of a new constitution on Kenyans in 2005, but by 2007, the
electoral arrangements that had been negotiated with Moi to ensure a credible
poll in 2002, were being rolled back. Following yet another
round of election related blood-letting, a new constitution was inaugurated in
2010 which was meant to change the way our politics worked. But, as last week
sadly showed, that is yet to take root. Too many ordinary Kenyans have been
seduced into thinking that the government knows best, that it is actually the
checks on the arbitrary exercise of power that are the problem, that instead of
protecting constraining rogue government, the constitution is making us more
vulnerable to terrorism. Despite the fact that it has largely failed to
implement the security system as envisaged in our constitution and laws, the
government has spun its own incompetence into a narrative of excessive
constitutional restraints.
So once again we hear the refrain that “Uhuru Kenyatta is not Moi.
You can trust him with power.” The false narrative is propagated that it was
Moi, not the concentration of unchecked power in the Presidency, that led to
the state-sponsored terror that killed many more Kenyans and destroyed many
more Kenyan lives than its religiously and ideologically inspired cousin. We
even hear talk that some oppression is actually fine, even desirable, and that
Moi, who has today been rehabilitated from oppressive and kleptocratic tyrant
to strong and wise leader and elderly statesman, was an effective bulwark
against terrorism, even as he massacred and terrorized. Kenya’s slide into the seductive embrace of
authoritarianism has been aided by the silencing of alternative voices, the
continuing demonization of civil society and the lobotomising of the news
agenda. Its purpose is to keep the citizenry divided, blind and uninformed,
only privy to the official truths of government spin-masters. The publication
of government press releases as news by the insipid media, and the Church’s
support for tyranny demonstrate just how successful the government has been.
The Security Amendment Act is the fruit of these efforts and
Parliament’s rush to adopt it is proof that the idea of the Assembly as a check
on Executive excess and not a rubber stamp for its decisions, has also been
abandoned. In the end, it is the people who must do the work of protecting the
country from its government, the labour of upholding the constitution. While
some, under the banner of “civil society” or “opposition” can take the lead, it
does not absolve the citizen from this duty. Just as it is the ordinary Kenyan
who will suffer from the worst excesses of unaccountable government, it is we
who must resist its re-emergence. We must not be suckered by the false notion that the government
knows best. It doesn’t. And even when we might be inclined to believe its good
intentions, history shows, it doesn’t stay that way for long. Those you think
are on your side today may very well turn out to be your oppressors tomorrow
and the laws being cheered on today will be the yoke of tomorrow’s subjugation.
That is the reality that Kenyans will sooner or later have to wake up to.
To download the analysis of the amended law click on the following links. Analysis
No comments:
Post a Comment