By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
Article 1(1) of the Constitution of Kenya 2010 declares, without ambiguity or qualification, that all sovereign power belongs to the people of Kenya. This is not mere rhetorical decoration embedded in a preamble. It is a foundational juridical statement, a deliberate constitutional architecture that locates the source of all governmental authority, not in Parliament, not in the Executive, and not in the Judiciary, but in the citizen. Nonetheless if one were to survey the landscape of Kenyan public life with intellectual honesty the brazen looting of public coffers, the theatrical accountability processes that produce no consequences, the institutions that exist more as ornaments of governance than instruments of it; one is compelled to ask a disquieting question: if sovereign power truly belongs to the people, why do the people continue to be governed so badly? The answer, uncomfortable as it is, lies in large measure with the citizens themselves. A people that is passive, disengaged, or resigned has, in effect, abdicated the sovereignty the Constitution vests in them. Active citizenship is not, therefore, a civic nicety. It is a constitutional obligation.
The architecture of the 2010 Constitution was itself a product of active citizenship at its most consequential. The sustained civic mobilisation, the deaths at Saba Saba, the years of constitutional agitation, the 2005 referendum campaigns, and ultimately the 2010 vote that ushered in the new constitutional order all of this was citizenship expressed not as passive electoral participation but as organised, purposeful, transformative pressure. The drafters of the Constitution understood that constitutions do not enforce themselves. This is why Chapter Six on Leadership and Integrity, Article 73 on responsibilities of leadership, and the entire framework of Chapter Fifteen establishing independent offices like the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the Commission on Administrative Justice, the Kenya National Human Rights Commission were designed as instruments requiring citizen activation. These institutions do not self-propel. They respond to pressure, to petitions, to public interest litigation, to organised civil society. Without the oxygen of active citizenship, they calcify into bureaucratic shells.
Impunity is not a natural condition; it is a cultivated one. It thrives where citizens look away, where the media is captured or intimidated, where civil society is defunded into irrelevance, and where political loyalty is traded for the tolerance of theft. The post-election violence cycles of 2007–2008, the Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing scandals, the NYS I and NYS II affairs, the COVID procurement fraud, and the successive Auditor-General reports that read like indictments of an entire governing class none of these persisted because accountability mechanisms were entirely absent. They persisted because citizens allowed the news cycle to move on, because impunity was not made to carry a political cost. In a functional democracy, impunity is punished at the ballot, prosecuted through public interest litigation, exposed through citizen journalism, and reversed through sustained institutional pressure. In Kenya, impunity has instead been rewarded with re-election, with political appointments, with presidential pardons. Active citizenship must shatter this cycle by making the cost of corruption and abuse of office permanently prohibitive.
The devolution framework under Chapter Eleven of the Constitution was one of the most radical redistributions of power and resources in Kenya’s post-independence history. It was designed to bring governance closer to the people, to create forty-seven accountability laboratories, and to ensure that citizens could monitor and interrogate the use of public resources at the county level. However the record of devolution is deeply ambiguous. County governments have, in numerous instances, replicated at a lower altitude the very pathologies they were meant to replace ethnic patronage, inflated procurement, wage bill crises, and the suffocation of the space for civic oversight. This is not a failure of constitutional design. It is a failure of civic engagement at the local level. Active citizenship in the context of devolution means showing up to county assembly public participation forums, scrutinizing ward development fund allocations, demanding audit reports from county executives, and holding Members of County Assembly to the legislative oversight function they were elected to perform. Devolution without engaged citizens is merely decentralized looting.
Good governance is not a gift that benevolent leaders bestow upon grateful populations. It is a permanent negotiation a continuous assertion by citizens of their constitutional rights, contested at every level against the natural tendency of those with power to retain and expand it without accountability. The public interest litigation jurisprudence that has emerged from Kenya’s superior courts since 2010 offers one of the most compelling illustrations of what organised, articulate citizenship can achieve. Petitions challenging unconstitutional legislation, enforcing socio-economic rights under Articles 43 to 46, holding constitutional commissions to their mandates, and compelling the state to account for extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances these legal victories were not gifts from an enlightened judiciary. They were extracted through the determination of citizens and advocacy organisations willing to invest the time, resources, and institutional courage to litigate matters of public interest. Every such petition is an act of active citizenship in its most sophisticated form.
The digital age has radically altered the terrain of civic engagement, and Kenya’s young, digitally connected population stands at a historically significant inflection point. The Finance Bill protests of June 2024, driven substantially by Gen Z citizens who had previously been regarded as politically apathetic, demonstrated with searing clarity what mobilized digital citizenship can accomplish. The coordinated use of social media for rapid information dissemination, for documenting state violence, for organising physical demonstrations, and for sustaining domestic and international pressure, forced a sitting government to make concessions that conventional political opposition had failed to secure. This was not a political party mobilisation. It was raw citizen power, expressed through digital solidarity. Yet that energy must be institutionalised beyond episodic protests if it is to produce durable structural change. Active citizenship must evolve from righteous outrage to organised, sustained engagement with the institutions that govern daily life.
Accountability, properly understood, is not solely the domain of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Judiciary, or the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. It begins with the citizen who reports a corrupt ward officer, the journalist who publishes the procurement irregularities in a county hospital, the teacher who attends a school board meeting and demands answers about capitation funds, and the lawyer who files a public interest petition on behalf of communities whose land has been grabbed by politically connected individuals. This diffuse, everyday accountability unglamorous, unmediated, and often personally costly is the sinew that connects constitutional principles to lived reality. A governance system in which accountability depends entirely on formal institutions is inherently fragile. The institutions are too few, too under-resourced, and too frequently captured by the very interests they are meant to police. Citizens must function as the first and most numerous line of accountability, not as passive spectators awaiting institutional rescue.
Kenya stands at a governance crossroads that is simultaneously familiar and urgent. Familiar, because the pathologies of impunity, institutional capture, and elite impunity have defined the post-independence political economy in ways that successive constitutions and reform cycles have not fully dislodged. Urgent, because the generation that will determine the country’s trajectory in the next fifty years is already politically awake, constitutionally literate, and impatient with the tolerance that previous generations extended to governing elites. Article 1 of the Constitution is not self-executing. Sovereign power does not flow automatically to the people because a constitutional text declares it so. It must be claimed, exercised, defended, and renewed through deliberate, organised, constitutionally grounded civic action. Active citizenship is not the supplement to good governance. It is its precondition. Until Kenyan citizens collectively internalize this and govern themselves accordingly the Constitution will remain a magnificent aspiration pressed between the covers of a document that power finds it convenient to ignore.
The writer is a lawyer and legal researcher
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