Ruto must be fired after referendum

The coalition Government of Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga is being threatened from within. Right inside the Cabinet there are people working against the achievement of Agenda Four. Yet without Agenda Four the coalition Government might as well breakup.

According to the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation (KNDR) Agenda Four identified what were considered the underlying issues that had caused the crisis in Kenya and which needed to be addressed because they threaten the existence of Kenya as a nation. Agenda Four, says KNDR, was designed to provide the framework for undertaking comprehensive constitutional and institutional reforms to address the root causes of the 2007 conflict and create a better, more secure and prosperous nation.

The Proposed Constitution is part and parcel of Agenda Four and whoever opposes it should have no business sitting in the coalition Government’s Cabinet. In any truly civilized and democratic country anyone who opposes such a major principle of the Government, as Kenya’s Agenda Four, would openly resign from any position in the Government. Apparently Kenya has yet to attain that level of civilization and democracy before leaders resign on matters of principle.

For that reason William Ruto, the Minister for Higher Education, Naomi Shaban, the Minister of State for Special Programmes and Samuel Poghisio, the Minister for Information and Communications want to be paid fat Government salaries, drive posh Government cars, be guarded by Government security as they move around the country condemning the most important Government policy, Agenda Four, which is highlighted by the Proposed Constitution, which they now have sworn to publicly undermine. That kind of tragicomedy can only take place in Kenya where politicians preach water and openly drink wine.

President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga must be the only heads of Government who tolerate such insubordination. Right now their hands might be tied by the referendum politics. Obviously they do not want to be accused of forcing any member of the Cabinet into the “YES” camp. Hence the ridiculous tolerance of people working against the very Government they claim to belong to and biting the hand that feeds them. That situation, however, should not be tolerated after the referendum. As soon as the referendum result are announced, the three ministers must be shown the door. This is regardless of whether the “YES” team wins or loses.

If, in the unlikely event the “NO” team wins, then the entire government must resign and the country should go for a general election. This is because a “NO” vote, like The Standard has very ably investigated, will, for all practical purposes, amount to a vote of no confidence in the Government.

As things stand at the moment, the main voices of the “NO” team, William Ruto and Samuel Poghisio have twisted the action taken by the NCIC against hate speech to mean repression of freedom of expression. The truth is that it is a fallacy to equate hate speech with free speech because one is a virtue while the other is a terrible evil. Poghisio and Ruto’s claim of being victimized for interpreting the Proposed Constitution has given the Clergy the courage to issue a Press Release that expounds that same misguided argument. In its Press statement, the Clergy ridiculously claims that those who should be charged with hate speech are members of the Committee of Experts for proposing some article “which when interpreted or explained may be considered to be hate speech by some people”.

The Clergy then goes ahead and misinterprets Article 63 (1) which states that Community land shall vest in and be held by communities identified on the basis of ethnicity, culture or similar community of interest. According to the Clergy the simple and direct interpretation of this article is that the tribal enclaves will be recognized in law, which is well and good, but then the “simple” interpretation of the Act by the Clergy becomes too simplistic when it claims that this means “in these areas, specific tribes will have preeminence over others”. The Clergy then misguidedly concludes this means “tribes wishing to evict ‘outsiders’ from their areas will only need to invoke the constitution once this draft is passed”. This is the most malicious misinterpretation of the Proposed Constitution.

The Clergy’s deliberate misapprehension of Article 63 (1) of the Proposed Constitution borders on hate speech itself when it says this part of the “draft constitution deliberately set up the state of ethnic hatred and violence, and the Committee of Experts should be charged with hate speech for this.” The Clergy, very conveniently and maliciously says nothing in its Press Release of Article 63 (2) (a) which says Community land consists of land lawfully registered in the name of group representatives under the provision of the law and that (b) it shall be land lawfully transferred by a specific community by any process of law and (c) it shall be any other land declared to be Community land by an Act of Parliament. What the Clergy doesn’t want to accept is that Community land will be very well defined legally and therefore so easy to specifically identify.

Instead of discussing and accepting that the Proposed Constitution talks of all these lawful methods of identifying Community land the Clergy again maliciously jumps to Article 63 (2) (d) which it also deliberately and maliciously misinterprets. That Article describes Community land as ancestral lands and lands traditionally occupied by hunter-gatherer communities.

To any reasonable being there is absolutely nothing wrong with that description but to the Clergy the use of term “ancestral lands” is wrong. The Clergy claims by stating that ‘ancestral land’ will be classified as community land , “ then Kenyans will be at pains to identify their ancestral lands since that is where they will be expected to settle and live.” According to the Clergy the provision thus nullifies the right of Kenyans to move and buy land and settle anywhere in the country.

It is very difficult to know where the Clergy got that weird conclusion from. The Clergy conveniently ignores Article 40 (1) of the Proposed Constitution which says subject to Article 65, which deals with landholding by non-citizens, every person has the right, either individually, or in association with others, to acquire and own property (a) of any description and (b) in any part of Kenya. That notwithstanding it is only through the identification of ancestral land that the Miji Kenda at the Coast can hope to get beck their land that has been taken from them by foreign land grabbers well before independence.

The Clergy correctly says that all land clashes in the history of Kenya were premised on the notion that some people had settled on the “ancestral” land of others. It however fails to acknowledge that the best way to solve the problem permanently is to recognize its existence legally and constitutionally define it. The CoE has admirably just done that. Instead of accepting that great work by the CoE to solve a major land problem in Kenya, the Clergy absurdly claims that the provision will setup the country for “unending ethnic based land clashes.” The Clergy then has the impudence of claiming that for setting the stage for ethnic violence in our beloved nation , the Committee of Experts should be charged with hate speech.

According to the CoE’s website for beginners the chapter on land sets out principles for the use of land and for the management of the environment. The overriding goal, according to CoE, is to protect land and the environment for the benefit of all Kenyans. It requires the use of land to be equitable, efficient, productive and sustainable. These are principle no land gabber anywhere in the world would support and Kenya is no exception.

The Clergy’s idea of accusing the CoE is not original. It comes from the rebel Cabinet Ministers who are determined to wreck the entire referendum process until the Proposed Constitution is amended to protect the rich and foreigners who own so much land when the indigenous Kenyans own nothing in their own country. Among the foreigners who own huge tracts of unutilized land in Kenya are Churches now calling for the rejection of the Proposed Constitution.

Previously they claimed they rejected the Proposed Constitution because of Kadhi Courts and abortion. Now that the debate on land has come out in the open the churches have come out in their true colours. They are fighting for land which they own in abundance when the majority of Kenyans are landless. The cat is out of the bag!