If the requirement of the law is that there must a declaration of results of an election and the person who is declared to have won the presidential election is then sworn in, if a citizen decides to carry out a swearing in ceremony, not having been declared by the IEBC to be a victor in an election, how does that act become treasonous?
Any citizen can decide to swear in himself as President and call his or her local priest. How is that treasonous? It would have no legal effect.
We know what the legal requirement for an effective act of the assumption of the Office of the President requires: If a citizen undertakes a process that has none of those underpinnings it will have no legal effect.
Whoever is talking of treason may just be looking to make a mountain out of a molehill, but there is certainly going to be a political statement being made.
Any call to characterise the second swearing-in as treason is nothing more than a political statement. The determination of Petition Nos. 2 and 4 of 2017 by the Supreme Court of Kenya delivered on Monday affirming the election on October 26, 2017, of His Excellency President Uhuru Kenyatta marks the close of the 2017 presidential elections.
It represents the fulfillment of an important aspect of the election process and must be respected by all citizens of Kenya.
However, it is deeply disturbing how violence has been a feature of the period of the concluded elections. It should never be the anticipation of any Kenyan that an election providing the opportunity for a citizen to exercise his or her political rights brings with it the prospect of losing property, of sustaining injury or of dying.
In the past week in which this cycle of violence has not ended, the leadership of the National Police Service cannot escape blame for precipitating a needless confrontation.
A notification of intention to hold an assembly and demonstration march duly received by the office of the Inspector General of Police was discarded in bureaucratic obfuscation and the demonstration march then violently dispersed with police officers captured in photographs stoning passing motorists at the scene.
The right to assemble and demonstrate guaranteed by Article 37 of the Constitution requires the police to facilitate and not to obstruct its safe and proper exercise.
The writer is the LSK President