House of cards: Dismantling executive hegemony to salvage the separation of powers in Kenya
by admin on | 2026-10-06 07:28:25
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In March 2025, Kenya\'s President and the country\'s most prominent opposition leader signed a ten-point memorandum that dissolved, in substance if not in name, the distinction between the governing coalition and the official opposition. This article asks what remains of the separation of powers once that distinction collapses: when the Leader of the Minority sits inside the government\'s own cooperation framework; when Parliament\'s oversight committees vote unanimously, across every party line, to protect a fund the courts have twice found unconstitutional; when two-thirds of the National Assembly can be found missing from the chamber at the precise moment a Finance Bill comes to its decisive vote; and when the Judiciary must negotiate its own survival budget with a Treasury it has no constitutional power to compel. Testing four provisions of the 2010 settlement (Articles 108, 118, 103 and 173) against the documented conduct of Kenya\'s Thirteenth Parliament between 2024 and 2026, the article argues that Kenya\'s constitutional architecture has not been abolished so much as choreographed: each institution performs its assigned steps, in the correct sequence, while the outcome is settled elsewhere. It closes by testing that finding against its strongest counter-evidence, courts and committees that still, on occasion, rule against executive convenience, before concluding that procedural fidelity and substantive capture are not, in Kenya\'s present arrangement, mutually exclusive.
I. Introduction
Down the dark aisle, Kenya goes again, to wed the usual spouse: the one who takes but never gives. She is all smiles, wishing she were to marry the better man this time, yet she has not in the slightest changed her ways. Step by step she marches, forcing a smile only after a bridesmaid signals her to do so; they must have rehearsed this a hundred times over the past month, and still she moves as though she has grasped nothing. Sunbeams pierce the coloured glass of the church windows, illuminating a perfect white dress marred by thick mud stains at the hem, where a careless child once stepped on it. The only saving grace is her silhouette: she has, at least, put in the work, though the same cannot be said of her husband. Again, she smiles. But why does she act this way? This is far from her first altar. The pastor is present, a last-minute replacement of the one promised in the brochure. He is the husband\'s best friend, who arrived to \"save\" the day. He produces the rings, heavy with a diamond crest that must have cost a fortune.
