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Government and Policy

Law enforcers must not be permitted to curtail Constitutional Rights

BY David Indeje · November 18, 2017 10:11 am

“Politics has got everything to do with each and every citizen’s life. If things go wrong as they have been for Kenya in the greater 50 years gone by then, the citizen’s present and future become precarious, gloomy, short, tortured, uncertain, and stagnant. Politics is not just about elections and election contests, political showbiz, political rhetoric, five-year cycles of false and romantic promises,” wrote Wekesa Cyprian Wanyonyi an Advocate of the Kenyan High Court.

The 2017 Presidential Elections have been very interesting and full of intrigues.

Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta won the presidential election on August 8, but the Supreme Court nullified the election. Mr Raila  Odinga withdrew few weeks to the repeat poll urging his supporters to boycott.

The results of the repeat poll have been contested once again.

On Monday, the Supreme Court judges will rule on the petitions that seek to invalidate the October 26 repeat Presidential poll.

“We will deliver judgment on the 20th,” Chief Justice David Maraga said at the end of the petitions hearing on Thursday.

On the other hand, 37 people died and 126 others were injured during the post-election chaos witnessed between August 9 and 15, according to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

According to Amnesty International research report “Kill Those Criminals: Security Forces Violations in Kenya’s August 2017 Elections’, at least 66 people have been killed by police in election-related violence since August. At least 33 of them died in the aftermath of the 8 August elections and another three were killed during the October re-run.

All these reported incidents have been denied by the police.

A recent survey the International Police Science Association ranked Kenya’s police force as the 125th worst-performing out of 127 national police forces studied in 2016.

 

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On Friday, at least five people were killed as the police tried to disperse supporters accompanying opposition leader Raila Odinga from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport according to the police.

“These incidences occurred before the police arrived at the various scenes,” the police said.

In response, Raila Odinga said “My anger is with that guy called Uhuru Kenyatta. I went abroad… After you welcomed me well, he sent policemen to teargas you, to beat my people, to fire bullets at them. Isn’t this barbaric? ” he told his supporters.

In an official statement, Raila said “This is a reckless, incentive and primitive response to a crisis Uhuru Kenyatta himself has created. But it has been carefully planned by Jubilee to create an atmosphere of fear and chaos in which the Supreme Court has to make its ruling.”

According to Raila, “We are sending a clear message to Uhuru and his backers that they are staring at an uneasy calm before the storm. A third Republic is at hand and no amount of violence, intimidation, and theft of elections will deter Kenyans from realising their dream of a government that has their popular mandate.”