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Nine years. That’s how long Kenya’s Parliament has sat on its hands since the High Court gutted the defective recall provisions in the Elections Act back in July 2017. Nine years of pious speeches about the will of the people while quietly ensuring that will can never bite them.
Article 104 of the 2010 Constitution could not have been clearer: the electorate has the right to recall an MP, and Parliament shall enact legislation to make it happen. “Shall,” not maybe one day when we feel like it.
Instead, our legislators did what they do best, which is, nothing. Or rather, they did something worse: they fixed the law for Members of County Assemblies in 2020 because county legislators are small fish whose removal barely ripples the national pond. But for themselves? Radio silence. The same people who thump their chests about devolution and accountability suddenly discovered that recall was too complex, too open to abuse, too sovereign to keep their jobs safe.
Former IEBC CEO Hussein Marjan put it bluntly in his 2024 letter: the Commission “cannot take any steps as regards a petition to recall a Member of Parliament owing to lack of comprehensive legal framework.” Translation: we have a constitutional right with no operating manual because the people who are supposed to write the manual like being unrecallable.
