When the people’s house (parliament) becomes the people’s auction house in Kenya
The Mt Kenya Times 
Parliament of Kenya
By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
“The trouble with our new nation… is that none of us has been able to outgrow the habits of the old.” Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People
There is a particular kind of nausea that rises when a republic begins to treat its own Constitution as optional stage dressing. Kenya’s Parliament was conceived as the living embodiment of popular sovereignty. It has instead perfected the choreography of a high-end auction house, where conscience is knocked down to the highest bidder, loyalty is rented by the hour, and constitutional duty is treated as a negotiable commodity. This is not mere political decay. It is moral decomposition conducted in full public view and with the calm assurance of those who believe the people have grown too weary to notice the stench.
Article 1 of the Constitution is not poetry. It is a legal and moral declaration: all sovereign power belongs to the people and is only delegated to State organs. Parliament does not own power. It holds it on loan, a temporary trusteeship. Every Member of Parliament and every Senator is a custodian, not a proprietor. The ballot is not a blank cheque for personal enrichment; it is a solemn transfer of trust. That trust was never meant to be monetized.
Yet this week the country was forced to listen as the custodians themselves described the terms of the sale. At a public rally, Suna East MP Junet Mohamed alleged that Members of the National Assembly received payments to secure the impeachment of former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, naming Senate Majority Leader Aaron Cheruiyot as the accounting officer of the transaction. The confession did not arrive wrapped in deniable innuendo. It was delivered with the casual confidence of a man recounting the price of cattle. Days later, Makueni Senator Dan Maanzo added his own testimony with clinical precision: he was offered ten million shillings to vote yes. The offer came with an explicit menu of consequences. Take the money and vote yes, and you are safe. Take it and disappear, or take it and vote no, and you may not reach home. He declined the silver and voted according to his conscience. Two serving legislators, speaking days apart, have placed on the public record allegations that one of the most consequential constitutional processes in recent years was lubricated by cash and enforced by threat.
If these assertions are true, what occurred was not legislative deliberation. It was constitutional prostitution conducted in the very chambers meant to guard the Republic. Language must not grow timid when institutions grow shameless. The 2010 Constitution was not the product of elite consensus or donor workshops. It was extracted through decades of authoritarian excess, detention without trial, assassinations, torture, electoral theft, and the systematic abuse of State power. The road to that charter was watered by sacrifice. Men and women lost livelihoods, freedom, and lives. Nearly seven out of every ten Kenyans 68.55 percent endorsed it in a referendum that was itself an act of collective exhaustion with the old order. They yielded their sovereignty into a transformative document that promised institutions would finally answer to citizens rather than to political patrons. Today one is forced to ask whether those sacrifices are being sold off in instalments, parcel by parcel, vote by vote.
The Constitution imagined Parliament as the crucible of public reason. Instead, too often, it functions as an extension of executive arithmetic. Numbers matter more than principles. Inducements speak louder than constitutional conscience. Debate is replaced by choreography. Oversight yields to obedience. Representation dissolves into patronage. That is why legislation carrying heavy economic consequences for ordinary households so frequently sails through despite overwhelming public opposition. Tax measures that deepen household suffering. Fiscal policies that tighten the noose around struggling families. Laws that appear written by people who have never stood in a supermarket queue or waited for a delayed salary. One begins to understand the growing popular conviction that Parliament inhabits a different republic entirely, a republic insulated from empty shopping baskets, collapsing businesses, unemployed graduates, and taxpayers who are asked to finance their own dispossession.
If public office becomes an investment vehicle, legislation inevitably becomes a return on that investment. Corruption does not merely steal money. It steals meaning. It hollows out institutions while leaving their buildings, their ceremonial robes, and their official stationery intact. Parliament still convenes. Hansard is still published. Votes are still counted. But constitutional legitimacy begins to rot the moment private interest consistently eclipses the public good.
And then there is the studied silence of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. Where is the institutional fury that should greet multimillion-shilling bribery allegations involving one of the most consequential processes of the decade? Why do spectacular claims involving political elites so reliably dissolve into procedural fog while minor offenders are pursued with theatrical efficiency? Selective accountability is simply impunity dressed in judicial robes. An anti-corruption body that appears vigorous only against the politically expendable gradually becomes a performance rather than a deterrent. Public trust does not collapse in a single dramatic moment. It dies by accumulation every unexplained silence, every abandoned file, every politically convenient delay, every investigation that evaporates the moment it approaches the powerful.
Institutions do not lose credibility because citizens become cynical. Citizens become cynical because institutions repeatedly earn that cynicism. These allegations also revive a larger national anxiety: whether independent offices remain independent or now operate beneath the long shadow of political will. Former Treasury Cabinet Secretary Professor Njuguna Ndung’u, speaking abroad, described a presidency intent on dominating institutions, shutting down dissent, and ensuring that its will endures. Officials, he suggested, conform out of fear. Whether one accepts every detail of his assessment is secondary. What matters is that the diagnosis resonates with a widespread popular perception of shrinking institutional autonomy.
Democracy rarely dies in a single dramatic coup. More often it dies politely. It dies when watchdogs become lapdogs. It dies when oversight becomes theatre. It dies when fear replaces fidelity. It dies when institutions preserve the appearance of constitutional form while surrendering constitutional substance.
Perhaps the most grievous casualty is Chapter Six, the chapter on Leadership and Integrity. It was never intended as ornamental constitutional poetry. It was designed as a living creed, an ethical compass demanding honesty, accountability, selfless service, and the maintenance of public confidence. Today it often seems more vibrant in civic education booklets than in the actual conduct of public life. Integrity cannot coexist comfortably with transactional politics. Constitutionalism cannot flourish where morality is treated as an inconvenient ideological accessory.
What we are witnessing is the quiet consolidation of tumbocracy government not by constitutional principle but by perpetual political bargaining, patronage, inducement, and expediency. Under tumbocracy, loyalty is purchased rather than earned. Convictions are leased for the duration of a vote. Public office becomes private enterprise. Citizens are reduced to spectators financing a theatre staged against their own interests. The tragedy is not merely that some leaders may have failed the Constitution. The greater tragedy is that constitutional betrayal risks becoming culturally acceptable. That is how republics decay not through military coups or the public burning of constitutions, but through ordinary people becoming accustomed to extraordinary misconduct.
Even so, responsibility cannot be permanently outsourced to the political class. The electorate also stands before a mirror. Every election asks a moral question before it asks a political one. Do we reward integrity or celebrate theatrics? Do we examine character or merely applaud charisma? Do we elect constitutional guardians or tribal champions? Do we entrust sovereign power to statesmen or to merchants of convenience?
Nations rarely obtain leaders radically different from the values they consistently reward. If voters repeatedly elevate individuals whose political philosophy begins and ends with personal advancement, Parliament cannot suddenly transform into a sanctuary of constitutional virtue. Institutions ultimately reflect the ethical quality of those entrusted to inhabit them. Kenya deserves legislators who understand that parliamentary privilege is inseparable from parliamentary responsibility; leaders who recognise that public office is stewardship rather than entitlement; representatives who measure success not by the size of their accumulated wealth but by the depth of public trust they still command.
The Constitution entrusted Parliament with protecting the Republic. It was never meant to protect political cartels. If the recent allegations prove true, they constitute not merely corruption but constitutional desecration. If they prove false, they must still be investigated with urgency so that truth not political convenience prevails. Either outcome demands action, because democracies cannot survive indefinitely on unresolved rumours that corrode public faith.
Perhaps one day Kenya will become the constitutional republic imagined in August 2010. That future will not be gifted by those who profit from institutional decay. It will be built by citizens who refuse to normalize dishonor, who reject moral relativism disguised as political strategy, and who insist that integrity is not an electoral slogan but a governing obligation.
Until then, the saddest irony remains: the House built to guard the people’s sovereignty risks becoming the marketplace where that sovereignty is sold, openly and without shame, to the highest bidder.
The writer is a social commentator
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