- The Westminster system served us well. Some false enthusiasm led us to adopt the presidential system.
- I never wavered from the view that we had received from the British the foundations on which a strong and prosperous nation could be built.
Image: GEORGE MUGO
For about three years, starting from 2014 to 2016, Charles Njonjo wrote a monthly column for The Weekend Star.
It was invariably one of the most popular features of the Siasa pullout section, which was devoted to political analyses. And of particular significance was that – in a country where political pundits pride themselves on being merciless to those in high places – he never once had anything negative to say about the two presidents he served. Nor yet did he ever criticize President Mwai Kibaki or Uhuru Kenyatta, both of whom are no doubt very well known to him personally.
The value of his essays then, lies in the views he expressed on various topical issues. Here is a selection of extracts:
On the Westminster parliamentary system vs the presidential system:
The presidential system has divided us, it has brought about all this nonsense I hear called the tyranny of numbers. What we need is a president who is also an MP, who has a constituency he has to answer for, who occasionally has to talk to ordinary voters in his own constituency, the way British prime ministers do.
The Westminster system served us well. Some false enthusiasm led us to adopt the presidential system. It’s time to admit we made a mistake and go back to the Westminster system. It has excellent checks and balances. It forces ministers routinely to have to justify themselves to Parliament and it has clear separation of powers just like any other democratic system.
I believe we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. We should have corrected whatever might have been a mistake in our Westminster system instead of abandoning it.
And I believe that so long as we retain this divisive presidential system we now have, we will continue to pay a steep price for it in having a top leadership which, irrespective of who is president, will unavoidably be very isolated from the concerns of ordinary people on a day to day basis.
On the 2010 'New' Constitution:
…to a large degree I blame the legal theorists who blindly copied from the South African constitution in coming up with our new Constitution.
They simply were not empirical enough in their approach to constitution-making. For if they had started with an empirical assessment of our needs as a nation, they would have realised that we were best served by minor modifications to what we already had: the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy.
On founding president Jomo Kenyatta:
…Jomo Kenyatta, people often forget, was a supremely sophisticated man. He may have later found it politically expedient to dress in those so-called “traditional robes” - leopard skin robes and the like. But this was a man who spent decades in Europe: partially in self-imposed exile; partially in a lonely struggle agitating for Kenyan independence.
Kenyatta understood, in a way that few other Kenyans did, what it took to create a functioning democracy. He had observed such democracies in Europe in the post-war period close up. He fully appreciated that a democracy must allow for and accommodate free speech.
For even at a time no one in the UK had any intention that the British empire should be dissolved, African nationalists like him were allowed to stand up in Hyde Park and argue strongly for the independence of their nations. Nobody harmed him. At most someone may have thrown a rotten egg or something like that, but he was not in any real danger just because he was arguing for freedom for black people in Kenya: something which most Europeans at that time considered to be simply an impossibility, as people like us were considered to be, intrinsically, incapable of ruling ourselves.
So Kenyatta understood democracy, and he allowed democracy to thrive. Even when he fell out with his former close friend Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, thereafter, of those Luo leaders who made it into Parliament a good number were appointed into the Cabinet. I know because I worked closely with many of them. And when some of these people went for elections they could as easily win or lose. Kenyatta didn’t guarantee to bring them back into Parliament and hence into his Cabinet through rigging - which would have been much easier back then than it is now. He neither rigged in Luo leaders whom he liked to allow them to remain in office nor did he rig out those he didn’t like.
On his time in Parliament:
Among those who opposed me in Parliament, week after week, and year after year, as I struggled to move forward the government’s legislative agenda, was the late veteran politician Martin Shikuku.
Shikuku was a delegate at the Lancaster House Conference that led to Kenya’s independence in 1963. But in later years, he stated plainly that if he had foreseen what independence would bring, he would have been content to have Kenya remain a colony of Great Britain.
He put it in these words: "If I had known that our struggle against colonialism would result in making Kenyans more impoverished, I would not have participated in it. Life was better under the colonialists."
Well, speaking for myself, even in the days when it was popular to speak dismissively of the British colonial government that ruled Kenya until we attained self-rule in 1963, I never wavered from the view that we had received from the British the foundations on which a strong and prosperous nation could be built.
If we had just continued with what the British had started, we would soon enough have achieved complete success, in what Jomo Kenyatta defined as our struggle against ignorance, poverty and disease. By which he meant, free education for all; economic opportunity for all; and free healthcare for all – just as you will find in the prosperous democracies of Western Europe, and the “newly industrialised nations” of Asia.