At the launch of his beyond 2030 vision conversation, President William Ruto told 5,000 delegates, and the rest of us really, that the exercise should happen “in the context of a new Constitution.”

And when the country raised its eyebrow, his spokesman rushed out to explain that no decision had been made. The wording here is crucial. It is not that the idea had been abandoned but that no decision had been made. This is how these things begin: With a suggestion.

Kenyans have seen this film before, and it does not end well for the ordinary citizen. You may not be old enough to remember (well, barely any of us is) but history is well recorded.

Kenya inherited a negotiated constitution at independence in 1963. It contained a federal structure, designed to distribute power. It contained a Senate. It contained checks. Within one year the dismantling had begun. By 1964 the regions had been stripped of authority.

In 1966 the Senate was dissolved, its powers absorbed into a National Assembly bent to the executive. Amendment followed amendment, each presented as modernisation, as efficiency, as the removal of colonial encumbrance. The cumulative effect was a president who could detain opponents without trial and a one-party state that treated the constitution as a hollow shell, amended whenever it obstructed the powerful.

That is the precedent. A document meant to protect the citizen, taken apart piece by piece by the very people it was designed to restrain, each cut justified in the language of progress. It took barely a decade to convert the promise of independence into the machinery of repression, and every step of that conversion was legal, procedural, and framed as reform. In precisely 19 years, Kenya moved from a balanced state with checks and balances to a one-party state, by law.

Sovereign power

The 2010 Constitution was written specifically to make that history impossible to repeat. It was the product of two decades of struggle, of the second liberation, of people who had been detained and tortured and exiled for demanding it. Its authors understood exactly what they were guarding against, because many of them had survived it.

So they built in the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, constitutional commissions, devolution to 47 counties, and above all the principle stated in Article 1: that all sovereign power belongs to the people, and is delegated, never surrendered. They made the document hard to change on purpose. In the years since, that difficulty has been the citizen’s quiet armour.

And it has been tested repeatedly. When the Building Bridges Initiative attempted to push through 74 amendments at once, expanding the executive and rearranging the state to suit the ambitions of the men at the top, it was the Constitution, and the courts enforcing it, that stopped them. The basic structure doctrine that emerged from that fight established something vital: that there are parts of this Constitution so fundamental that no government, however large its majority, may simply erase them. When the executive has overreached, ignored court orders, borrowed beyond its ceilings, or reached for citizens in the night, the Constitution has been the last line of defence, the thing standing between a frustrated executive and its worst instincts.

A government that has spent years colliding with a document does not decide it needs a new document because the old one is outdated. It decides it needs a new one because the old one works. It works too well. It says no too often.

The desire for a “new Constitution” is rarely a desire for better governance. It is a desire for fewer obstacles. What restrains the president is what protects the people. Remove the restraint, and you have not modernised anything.

BBI amendments

Notice, too, the vehicle. The constitutional change is not being proposed openly, as its own question, to be debated on its own merits. It is being smuggled inside a development plan, a 34-year vision so distant that its architects will be beyond accountability (likely beyond alive) by the time anyone can measure it.

Who could object to thinking about the future, or oppose a mere conversation? This is the oldest trick in the book: if we can wrap the controversial thing inside the unobjectionable one, the critics start to look unreasonable. The 74 BBI amendments were also sold as unity, as healing, as progress. The packaging is always benevolent. The contents rarely are.

So here is what must be understood, and understood now, before the trial balloon becomes a bill and the bill becomes a referendum question framed as national renewal. The Constitution of 2010 is not the executive’s to rewrite for its convenience. It belongs to the people who bled for it, and to the ones not yet born who will need its protection as much as this generation has.

Every clause the political class finds inconvenient is a clause some Kenyan will one day need. The independent judiciary that frustrates this president will one day shield a citizen from the next. The Article 1 that this government resents is the same article that gives every one of us standing to say no.

Defending the Constitution is the precondition for every other freedom we have. Governments are temporary. Presidents leave. The document is meant to outlast all of them, and it will, but only if the people whose sovereignty it protects refuse to let it be quietly dismantled in the name of a vision none of them asked for. They took the last one apart in a decade. We must not hand them the chance to do it again.

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