KANYADUDI: Why the best tribute to Raila will nurture selfless good governance

The King is dead! Long live the King! After a formal declaration of the demise of the enthroned royal is made, the succession process begins in earnest.

The holder of the royalty’s privy purse then discloses the contents of the will. This is the practice within the dominions of monarchies. In constitutional democracies, this is not normally the case, as succession is constitutionally laid out.

However, Kenya today finds herself in unique and unchartered waters. A giant has fallen; a king outside the throne has rested. Fortunately, because of his enduring foresight, Raila Odinga detailed his end times.

He left a Will in which he declared that he should be interred within 72 hours of his death. In honouring the Will, the state and family settled Sunday, October 19 as the of burial next to his mother’s grave.

This is to accommodate the traditions of the Anglican Church of Kenya, Luo cultural traditions and state protocols. Mary Juma Odinga died while Raila was in detention and the agony of being denied a chance to bury his mother remained a pain throughout his life and caused him great anguish and trauma.

Born 80 years ago, Raila rose to become a pillar of Kenya’s nationhood, regional integration and a global peacemaker. He has been the enigma of our politics and a pan-Africanist par excellence.

His lifetime struggles were dedicated to justice, equity and national cohesion. He strongly believed that these tenets of governance were too noble to be entrusted to the good behaviour of leaders.

He, therefore, championed their enshrinement in the supreme statutes devoted to constitutional institutions. He was sure these values could only be protected and enjoyed through good governance. And these could only be best secured by constitutional guarantees.

These institutions have been granted immense powers to undertake and discharge their duties effectively. However, doubts have been cast as to whether they have done their duty. To a large extent, the opinion is that the institutions have been undermined. However, it is not in doubt that Jakom devoted the last drop of his energy to defending the separation of powers and responsibilities among these institutions.

This sometimes put him on a collision path with his allies in the Parliament and the Executive arm of the government, but being the principled ideologue, he stood his ground. He always chastised his allies who refused the basic fabric of good governance practices. In the same vein he never hesitated to call out leaders of key governance institutions who deliberately chose to circumvent the will of the people by manipulating the law.

When there was a stalemate in early 2010 regarding the type of executive structure to be designed in the new constitution, Raila chose to forgo the parliamentary system. He instead went along with those who pushed for the presidential system of executive governance. He proudly did this to secure what had been closest to his heart: devolution. He had been a consistent crusader for the decentralisation of power from the centre to grassroots.

His model differed starkly from that of the defunct district focus for rural development contained in Sessional Paper No. 1 of 1985 under the tutelage of Dr Robert Ouko, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Raila had envisaged a governance structure that dispersed power, responsibilities and oversight at every stage of authority.

At the country level, there would be the national and county governments, both independent of and complementary to each other. The two levels of government are expected to serve the interests and at the will of the public. The national government is to share the tax revenue equitably with the 47 counties.

The Executive arm of the national and county governments should devote proportionate amounts of resources for development and services to the citizens. However, this has sadly not been achieved. The county governments continue to complain of sabotage by the national government, thereby affecting their efficiency in service delivery. The county governments themselves have been fingered for corruption and ineptitude. The citizens have thus suffered in the hands of both levels of government.

On another front Raila believed that a nation will get the leaders it deserves and for that, he always championed a conscientious society. This was only possible through rigorous and continuous civic and political education. During his stint as the premier, he lobbied for local and international support for massive education of the public on their civic rights and duties. He was so committed to this cause that he firmly believed only impartial players would undertake this mandate successfully. In this regard, he pushed for the active and central participation of the civil society in offering civic education. He also led the legislative entrenchment of the Political Parties’ Fund. This legislation ensured that every political party was allocated resources from the Consolidated Fund in proportion to their electoral strength.

Raila also demonstrated that an enlightened citizenry would be capable of electing political leaders committed to serving the public good. However, an uninformed citizenry is wont to be misinformed and exploited by society’s elite for the sake of political expediency. He thus viewed civil society and political parties as key planks in sustaining democracy. He had pushed for a parliamentary system under multiparty democracy. Under this system, he understood, and rightly so, that the roles of the executive arm of government and those of the state are separate and distinct.

He had reservations about the presidential system that fused the functions of the state and the executive arm. In the parliamentary system, there is the institution of the head of state with powers and authority different from those of the executive head, ordinarily a prime minster.

Our current challenges with the overwhelming powers of the presidency have come to prove him right. If the country had adopted a parliamentary system, then the executive would have been dispersed with and authority and shared between the head of state and executive arm of government.

As a consequence, this would provide the necessary checks and balances in the exercise of power and authority. In the same plan, the legislature would be two tiered: the National Assembly and the Senate.

The Senate was envisaged to be the upper house but because the drafters were MPs, out of greed, they created an upside-down Parliament. The outcome eventually defeated the intention by making the Senate subservient to the National Assembly. It is only at the Judiciary where appropriate internal checks and balances were entrenched.

The Supreme Court was established and this expanded the justice corridor by providing additional avenues for redress. In the overall, Raila wished for a Judiciary that is independent and capable of rendering unabridged justice and a presidency that respected the will of the people.

The greatest disappointment has been in the legislature where MPs have arrogated and legalised executive duties to themselves and abandoned their primary roles of representation, oversight and legislation. The appetite for resources has compromised the integrity of the MPs to the detriment of transparency and accountability.