Kenya: The Struggle for a New Constitutional Order (Africa Now) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780323654 ISBN 13: 9781780323657

Verlag: Zed Books, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

An important interrogation of the 2010 Kenyan constitution and its implications for the country's deep-seated problems of state and society.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Godwin R. Murunga is a senior research fellow in the Institute of Development Studies, University of Nairobi, and director of the African Leadership Centre. He is also a visiting professor in the Global Institutes at King's College London. He is a trained historian with a PhD from Northwestern University in Illinois, specialising in urban history but with research interests in democratisation processes in Africa, politics of knowledge production and masculinities in Africa. His current research project focuses on the role of settlements in peace-building and state-building in Kenya.

Duncan Okello is currently the Chief of Staff in the Office of the Chief Justice, Republic of Kenya. He holds a BA degree in political science and history as well as a law degree, both from the University of Nairobi. He also holds an MA in international relations from the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. His policy and research interests revolve around questions of democratisation and institution-building for societies in transition, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and how development outcomes mediate and influence state and citizen relations in Africa. He previously worked as director of programmes at the Institute of Economic Affairs in Kenya, and as the Regional Director for Eastern Africa for the Society for International Development.

Anders Sjögren is a senior researcher with the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala. He holds a PhD in political science from Stockholm University. Working in the field of the comparative political economy of development and state-society relations in Africa, his current research is on land conflicts, state formation and citizenship in Kenya and Uganda.

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Kenya: the struggle for a new constitutional order

By Godwin R. Murunga, Duncan Okello, Anders Sjögren

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Godwin R. Murunga, Duncan Okello and Anders Sjögren
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78032-365-7

Contents

Acronyms and abbreviations, 
Preface, 
Towards a new constitutional order in Kenya: an introduction GODWIN R. MURUNGA, DUNCAN OKELLO AND ANDERS SJÖGREN, 
PART ONE Contexts and actors in the making of a new constitution, 
1 The protracted transition to the Second Republic in Kenya PAUL TIYAMBE ZELEZA, 
2 Fuelling the violence: the print media in Kenya's volatile 2007 post-election violence SAMMY GAKERO GACHIGUA, 
3 Mediating Kenya's post-election violence: from a peace-making to a constitutional moment E. NJOKI WAMAI, 
4 Instrumentalism and constitution-making in Kenya: triumphs, challenges and opportunities beyond the 2013 elections RAYMOND MUHULA AND STEPHEN NDEGWA, 
5 Revisiting 'the two faces of civil society' in constitutional reform in Kenya WANJALA S. NASONG'O, 
PART TWO The content, challenges and opportunities of a new constitutional order, 
6 Constitutions and constitutionalism: the fate of the 2010 constitution YASH PAL GHAI, 
7 Elite compromises and the content of the 2010 constitution GODWIN R. MURUNGA, 
8 Security and human rights in the new constitutional order in Kenya MUTUMA RUTEERE, 
About the contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The protracted transition to the Second Republic in Kenya

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

In 2007 and 2010, two crucial events took place with profound implications for Kenyan history and society. The first event was the tragedy that followed the disputed general elections of 27 December 2007. The violence that convulsed the country left 1,100 people dead and 600,000 displaced, and threatened the very survival of Kenya.

The second event marked a rare moment of triumph. Kenyans, chastened by the ghosts of 2007 and anxious for new beginnings, voted for change. The voter turnout was high for a traumatised demos that seemed to understand that the referendum offered a historic opportunity for the country to remake itself in the wake of its battered past. If 2007 marked the nadir of the 'First Republic', 2010 represented the possible birth of a 'Second Republic' based on inclusive citizenship, good governance, devolution of power and more equitable development.

The first moment gave rise to profound despair about Kenya's future, while the second has been greeted with exaggerated hopes. Having stared into the abyss in December 2007 and January 2008, the country pulled back, and the political class made tepid compromises to save their nation through the formation of a coalition government, which delivered a new constitution in August 2010. Clearly, the crisis begat the constitution; in short, the possibilities of democracy and development promised by the new constitutional dispensation were incubated in the violent maelstrom two and a half years earlier, a development few could have predicted.

From the moment the implosion started, there was a continuous stream of commentaries and analyses all over the old and new media in Kenya itself, among the Kenyan diaspora, and from the country's friends and foes around the world. The Kenyan observers and intelligentsia were bitterly divided as the crisis unleashed intolerant ideological, political and ethnic chauvinisms. Some were quite apocalyptic about Kenya's future. Introducing a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Peter Kagwanja and Roger Southall wrote: 'The post-election crisis of January 2008 brought Kenya close to collapse and the status of a failed state.' They located 'the origin of the crisis in, variously, a background of population growth and extensive poverty; and ethnic disputes relating to land going back to colonial times (notably between Kalenjin and Kikuyu in the Rift Valley). More immediately, what stoked the conflict is the construction of political coalitions around Kenya's 42 ethnic groups.' And they were not too hopeful about the future, suggesting that 'a reluctance by the Grand Coalition partners to undertake fundamental reform of the constitution means that Kenya remains a "democracy at risk", and faces a real possibility of slipping into state failure' (Kagwanjaand Southall 2009: 259). Several articles in this issue and another special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies variously attributed the crisis to elite fragmentation and the existence of non-programmatic clientelist parties, political liberalisation and institutional fragility, the informalisation and criminalisation of the state, and the decentralisation and privatisation of violence (Branch andCheeseman 2009; Lafargue 2009; Mueller 2008).

Often thick with political details, many of the existing analyses tend to be thin on the economic dynamics of the crisis, even those that purport to advance a political economy perspective. Also, their nods to the historical context – that this crisis is rooted in Kenya's complex past – tend to be perfunctory in so far as their primary focus centres on the contemporary dynamics of the crisis. In this chapter, I seek to provide a much longer-term mapping of the historical trajectory of Kenya's political economy, which culminated in both the tragic and the triumphant events of 2007 and 2010 respectively. My argument is that both events are rooted in, and reflect, Kenya's contradictory colonial and postcolonial histories; they mirror the intertwined challenges of development and democracy; and they represent simultaneously the failures of, the struggles for, and the possibilities of constructing a developmental democratic state from the debilitating burdens of colonial underdevelopment and despotism and postcolonial developmentalism and dictatorship. The contrasting, yet connected, developments between 2007 and 2009 underscore the challenges of historical analysis and prediction.

I begin with a brief outline of the legacies of British colonialism in Kenya, the structural underpinnings and ideological parameters of which were inherited by the postcolonial state. Then I examine, again sketchily, the modes of governance and development during what I would call the period of authoritarian developmentalism between independence and 1980, which was followed by the era of neoliberal authoritarianism that lasted until 2002. Finally, I focus on the changes and contradictions ushered in by democratisation, out of which erupted both the failed elections of 2007 and the successful referendum of 2010. Throughout, I try to put Kenya in the context of wider trends in African and global histories for the obvious reason that the country is an integral part of both, and its constitutional story is part of this long and still unfolding historical process.

The political economy of colonialism and its legacies

Colonialism was, fundamentally, an economic enterprise that required political execution and ideological justification. Thus, any meaningful analysis of colonialism and its legacies in Kenya or elsewhere has to examine the nature and dynamics of colonial capitalism, the colonial state and colonial ideology. The construction of these elements entailed the coercive imposition, countervailing resistance and subsequent articulation of European and African systems and structures. The colonisation of Africa was broadly driven by the needs of the industrial capitalist countries to find markets for manufactured goods, outlets for investment and sources...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zed Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1780323654
• ISBN 13: 9781780323657
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Herausgeber: Murunga Godwin R., Okello Duncan, Sjogren Anders
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland