OMWENGA: Why Uhuru’s endorsement of Matiang’i is unsettling to some

Listening to retired President Uhuru Kenyatta call in to address a mammoth Jubilee Party crowd in Narok, one could not but hear the echoes of his father.

The Gen Z would find this difficult to relate that most people in their Gen X or Baby Boomer parents’ ages only heard Jomo Kenyatta’s voice on radio as they had no access to television. And mzee could deliver those speeches in a captivating manner, sometimes complete with language we cannot ascribe to him.

Uhuru’s phone call was equally captivating, fiery and has no doubt unsettled many who assumed—or more accurately were on their knees praying that he would just quietly enjoy retirement and not get involved in politics anymore.

To think or wish so is naïve as that phone call was a marker to say to all and sundry, if you think Uhuru was just going to be on the sidelines watching this high-stakes game being played out, shake yourself off that dream.

Uhuru dismissed critics telling him to remain silent in retirement, questioning why previous leaders were not treated similarly. "When I speak one or two things, I am told I have retired and should go home.

Why didn't they tell Moi to retire and go home?” he asked. Uhuru reaffirmed Jubilee’s strength and the fact that the party is now "safely back in his hands" after efforts to steal it from him.

The former president urged his supporters to focus on grassroots recruitment and restructuring the party as it fields candidates for all positions, either alone or in a coalition. He also made it known for those in caves who his choice to defeat his successor come 2027 is.

In efforts to blunt this huge political declaration affirming former Super CS Fred Matiang’i as his choice to carry the Jubilee and therefore the opposition’s flag, some senator rushed to file a motion in Parliament seeking to strip Uhuru of his retirement benefits on the grounds that he has engaged in partisan political activity, allegedly in violation of the Presidential Retirement Benefits Act.

It is a politically useful argument to those grasping at the straws, but it is also, on closer inspection, a legally impotent one.

Kenya’s constitutional framework is not ambiguous on this point. Article 151(3) provides that the retirement benefits of a former president “shall not be varied to their disadvantage during their lifetime.”

This is not casual drafting. It reflects a deliberate decision by the framers to insulate former presidents from precisely the kind of shifting political winds now animating this motion. The dignity of the office, once held, was to be protected not as a personal favour, but as an institutional safeguard.

The Presidential Retirement Benefits Act makes operational that constitutional guarantee, setting out a generous package that includes pension, security, staff and logistical support.

But it also contradicts other parts of the constitution by assuming that a retired president will withdraw from active partisan politics and adopt a more restrained, advisory role—a kind of elder statesman model that is as much aspirational as it is legal.

That assumption underlies the hurriedly filed motion which is more for show than having any real chance of garnering the two-thirds majority of the members of the National Assembly, let alone judicial review.

Uhuru, like any other Kenyan, retains his political rights. Article 38 guarantees every citizen the right to participate in political processes. Any attempt to read the Retirement Benefits Act as imposing a blanket prohibition on political activity would be unconstitutional because statutory provisions cannot extinguish rights that the Constitution explicitly protects.

Even if one were to assume, for the sake of argument, that Uhuru has crossed into partisan terrain, the remedy being proposed—a wholesale withdrawal of benefits—is staggeringly disproportionate.

Constitutional interpretation in Kenya, as elsewhere, is guided not only by text but by the principle of proportionality, which is absent in the motion.

This, then, is nothing but an effort to blunt Uhuru’s monumental endorsement of Matiang’i and this includes a corresponding spike in fake social media posts, which one can expect more of the same going forward, but will not change the trajectory.