Sharp Objects

The essays presented in his new book, Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy in Kenya, underpin the two basic recommendations that he made to the Building Bridges Initiative. They amplify, illustrate and justify in greater detail the need for Kenya to introduce constitutional reforms at this stage in favour of parliamentary government (as opposed to the current presidential system), and proportional representation in the election of legislators at all levels. On Kenya specifically, the essays touch repeatedly on its immediate post-independence experience that saw the elimination, as elsewhere in Africa, of parliamentary government and its replacement by an autocratic presidentialism, the resistance to one-party rule in the 1990s, the betrayals after the 2002 General Election that were won by Narc, and the electoral crisis thereafter. Lessons in favour of the two basic constitutional reforms are drawn from that diversity of experiences, and theories. Prof Nyong’o is both a statesman and an intellectual. That is a rare combination of skills in Kenya today compared with where the country (and Africa generally) was in the immediate post-independence period. In those days, Africans debated their most fundamental political and economic development policies against the backdrop of the contours of thought charted by their leaders in government or out of it. One thinks of Tom J. Mboya, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkurumah, Leopold Senghor, Dunduzu Chisiza, Frantz Fanon and many others. It became normal for the first generation of African leaders to commit their thought and policy goals to paper and to invite debate. The goals of African independence, African identity, national unity, African socialism, strategies of achieving pan-African unity, economic development, inequality, non-alignment in international affairs — all these were subjected to vigorous public debate. These essays should strengthen the public debate on constitutional reforms now underway in Kenya. In that context, one of the ideas I have fully shared for long with Prof Nyong’o is that of the need to replace the presidential system of government with a parliamentary one because the latter is better suited to an ethnically polarised society like ours. A parliamentary system is no panacea, as he states at one point, but it is far better suited to our politics than the highly divisive majoritarian-based presidentialism.