Will the last person to leave Kenya on Aug 27 please turn off the lights?

By KWAMCHETSI MAKOKHA, kwamchetsi@formandcontent.com
Posted Friday, August 20 2010 at 15:49


Next Friday, the Kenya many right-thinking people have always known and loved will disappear. From August 27, Kenya will begin to go downhill, thanks to the new Constitution that will come into force.

Just imagine that women, instead of being pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen, will start showing up in public to occupy one third of all elective and appointive offices.

The National Assembly alone will have 47 women, the Senate 18 and each county assembly will reserve at least one third of its membership for them. They will also have equal rights in marriage as men, totally disregarding the fact that they are formed off the rib of a man.

They will be able to confer citizenship on their children and their foreign spouses, without having to obtain permission from a male relative.

And it gets worse. The hallowed tradition of sowing wild oats and letting nature take care of them is threatened in the new order. Children will be entitled to parental care and protection, which includes equal responsibility of the mother and father to provide for the child whether they are married or not. How unAfrican!

People who cannot see, hear, use their limbs or other key function will no longer be the butt of jokes. In the new humourless Kenya, you cannot call people with disability names for self-entertainment – because the Constitution now entitles them to be treated with dignity, respect and to be addressed and referred to in a manner that is not demeaning.

Over time, expect that people with disability will constitute five per cent of all elective and appointive positions in government. For starters, there will be one man and one woman with disability in Senate and some more in Parliament. How boring!

Besides crowding the national leadership and making it unattractive, the new constitutional order also requires one to be a saint to serve the public. Jobs in the public sector, including elective ones, will now require stringent conditions like honesty, declaring conflicts of interest and being accountable.

Who wants to work in a stifling environment where you cannot have a foreign bank account, keep gifts brought to you by grateful citizens or bid for government contracts?
State officers – who include MPs and senior government officials – can no longer have a personal relationship with a shylock. How does that affect a person’s ability to append their signature to a document?

Well, that is the new Constitution for you. What prudishness!

One would have thought that after all the trouble leaders will be put to, there would be some protection for them. Hardly!

The well-worn habit of frustrating election petitioners from serving the newly-elected MP with court papers will die because anyone can place a notice in a newspaper with national circulation, and eureka!

Some busybody electorate can also decide to recall their elected member of Parliament – without compensating them for the expense of getting to Parliament. What injustice!

What should get everyone’s goat is how the propertied have to behave. Any investment in property that you make will have to benefit local communities and their economies.

Land illegally acquired – meaning that if it was gifted to you for dancing during a political rally – can be repossessed. This means that working for your own profit alone will no longer be sufficient to make you an investor. How discouraging!

Workers – including domestic help, farm hands and security guards – will soon have the right to go on strike. Imagine returning at 3am from the customary Friday tipple to find the guards in your area holding a union meeting, the baby minder on a go-slow and the lawns still un-mown because of labour issues.

You will only fire or rebuke them if you enjoy listening to unions boss Francis Atwoli. Everybody will have the right to hold a demonstration and present petitions to people in authority.

Just imagine the traffic jams that will be created everywhere by twig-carrying, chanting professional demonstrators who cannot be touched by the police.

The upshot of that is that the business of supplying the police with anti-riot gear, water cannons and tear gas will be severely constrained. What anarchy!

Then, of course, the security organs – such as the police and the armed forces – will need to obey the law, respect human rights and people. They cannot torture, or treat anyone cruelly or inhumanely.

Will the last person to leave Kenya on Aug 27 please turn off the lights?