Stop Electing Messiahs — In 2027, Kenya Should Elect the Constitution

Every five years, Kenya performs the same ritual. We search the horizon for a saviour — a man or woman whose biography we can project our hopes onto, whose rhetoric can paper over our unresolved contradictions, and whose victory we can celebrate as if the act of winning an election is itself a form of national transformation.

We have been doing this since 1992. We did it with Kibaki. We did it, in our complicated Kenyan way, with Odinga. We did it emphatically with Ruto. And if we are not careful, we will do it again in 2027 — swapping one set of personalised hopes for another while the structural problems that no president has yet solved continue to deepen.

The Constitution of Kenya 2010 was supposed to change this. Its architects — and I was among those who spent years teaching it to communities across the country — designed a document that deliberately spread power and accountability across multiple institutions precisely because we understood that concentrating hope in a single leader was a recipe for perpetual disappointment.

Sixteen years on, the institutions that the constitution created — the SRC, the IEBC, independent commissions, devolution — have been systematically weakened, captured or simply ignored whenever they produced inconvenient outputs. The SRC just won a major court victory confirming its authority over public servant salaries. Parliament cheered. The executive, quietly, began looking for workarounds.

2027 should be different. Not because a better messiah is on the way, but because Kenyans — particularly young Kenyans who led the Gen Z protests of 2024 — have shown that they understand the difference between systems and saviours. They did not march for a candidate. They marched for accountability, transparency and a government that spends their taxes on services rather than on patronage networks.

The 2027 election manifesto that deserves to win is one that commits to funding the IEBC properly, ending executive interference with the Judiciary, publishing real-time cabinet ministry expenditure data, and giving the Director of Public Prosecutions operational independence that is genuinely free from State House pressure. Is there a candidate willing to run on that platform? Perhaps. Are Kenyans ready to vote for it? That is the question that will define this election.