Why is it that Kenyans are able to coexist
peacefully and work together for four out
of five years? What is this mysterious
tribal card that only works in the fifth
year? Ask the politicians for that is their
ticket to the revered place that they share
bread.
The safeguard to institutional failure has
always been the judiciary, since this is
where we expect to find justice and sense.
What we were not ready for was failure
in this arm of government and with the
safety valve off the country is in unfettered
free fall.
Looting the national and county governments
has become the national pastime and officials
are eating the national bread for breakfast,
lunch and dinner topping it up as desserts
without due regard as to the source of this
money and what their role in national develop-
ment is.
Unfortunately the judiciary is not immune
to the bread sharing shenanigans and it
has become common knowledge that the
best way to break the law is to use the law.
Justice is to the highest bidder and we
subvert the law everyday using the law! When morality and basic decency goes
out of the window, when a man with
a conscience is capable of using his
intellectual capacity to hoodwink the
public, when pursuit for earning an
unscrupulous shilling is more important
than the truth, then we truly have a
problem.
With justice up for sale, impunity reigns
supreme, since the court can tie you up
in convoluted court procedures that lack
rhyme or rhythm while lawyers make
fortunes defending the indefensible in
broad daylight and thereby eroding our
very moral fiber. We have become accustomed to the rule
of law being thwarted by institutions
that deliberately ignore court orders or
circumvent them but equally worrying
is the courts entertaining frivolous cases
many of them which are a blatant abuse
of the court process.
In Kenya it no longer who is right but
who has might that gets ‘justice’. Our
high caliber lawyers are just brains for hire
and we routinely see them descend like a
pack of wolves to defend cases and people
in what may be legally defensible, usually
on technicalities but its highly unethical. You cannot employ tactics of the crooks
to run roughshod on your very subjects.
It is in the interest of any state that law
and order is ingrained in all sectors. In
the Kenyan situation it looks as though
the system is in competition with the
citizenry in massacring the law vide
blatant disregard for court orders.
At the county level all we have done is to
devolve the sharing of bread and in this
scenario the counties seem to have been
curved out of tribal locations where the
criterion for bread sharing has changed to
the clan, sub-clan, and now even family
levels.
In most counties the local vernacular is the
official language of business and it would
not take you long to realize that you are in
the wrong location. In prominent families
the topic at meal times is the county as
individual families run them.
We would be hard pressed to answer if
that is what the crafters of the constitution
had in mind when they were drafting the
constitution but we sincerely hope that
clustering Kenyans into tribal enclaves
was not the intent of the exercise.
Unfortunately we are also aware that the
drafters could also have been in a b