CCR-Kenya's Statement On The Proposed Constitution

Kenya, as currently constituted, is dysfunctional, artificial, and inorganic. Our country was created out of injustice, denying the people control over their natural resources, particularly land. The underlying reason why Kenyans have fought for a new constitution for almost three decades, is to basically correct this historical injustice.

However, Kenya is not an isolated case with respect to natural resource / land related injustices. Rather, such injustices are systemic and global, presently affecting every country in the world, including industrialized ones.

The root cause of the crises that affect humanity on a massive scale - mass poverty, displacement / landlessness, food insecurity, environmental degradation / climate change, wars, political instability / bad governance / corruption, pandemics, social collapse - is the unsustainable extraction of natural resources by multinational corporations, in a process that is facilitated by bilateral and multilateral agreements, and supported by international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization.

Everything that we use is derived from or depends on the use of natural resources, which include land, water, fossil fuels, minerals, forests, fisheries, and biological resources. However, multinational corporations are increasingly concentrating this natural wealth into fewer hands. A 2008 United Nations report revealed that the problem lies in a governance gap, whereby companies operate as multinational corporations, but are regulated at the national level, thus leading to conflicts and violations of human rights and environmental standards.

A major study on global wealth distribution further revealed that the richest 1% of adults own more than half of global wealth, while the richest 10% own 85% of global wealth. In contrast, the bottom half of the world's adult population own barely 1% of global wealth. Rather than lift the poor, corporate-driven globalization has therefore caused record income and wealth disparities between rich and poor nations, as well as between rich and poor within nations. It has greatly subdued democracy and social justice, destroyed local communities and pushed farmers off their traditional lands. It has also accelerated the greatest environmental breakdown in history. The only real beneficiaries of globalization are the world's largest corporations, their top officials, and the global bureaucracies that they helped to create.

Since corporate-driven globalization is the problem, it would therefore seem logical to return to the"local" - to reinvigorate the conditions by which local communities regain the power to determine and control their preferred economic and political paths. Instead of shaping all systems to conform to a global model that emphasizes specialization of production, comparative advantage, export-oriented growth, monoculture and homogenization of economic, cultural, and political forms under the direction of multinational corporations, we must reshape our institutions to favour exactly the opposite. (See related video: Part 2 - A Case Of Corporate-Driven Globalization: http://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=TDZK_QCrl3A).

CCR-Kenya therefore supports the Proposed Constitution and calls upon all Kenyans who are eligible to vote at the Referendum on August 4th (tomorrow), to vote YES!

Coalition For Constitutional Reforms, Kenya [CCR-Kenya]

(Nairobi, Kenya - 3rd August 2010)