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Criticise public officers with decorum

speech

Kenya has some reasons to be proud for the space it has gained around freedom of speech. file photo | nmg

Drawing up rights is very often a balancing act, but few places can be as hard, in ensuring fairness for all, as freedom of speech.

Defining where opinion becomes abuse, where protest becomes hate, and where comment becomes defamation, or even a criminal charge, remains a near industry, worldwide.

But Kenya has some reasons to be proud for the space it has gained around freedom of speech. To whit, last week, Justice E.C. Mwita declared one particular section of Kenya’s Penal Code unconstitutional, and struck it from the books. The criminal offence of ‘undermining authority of a public officer’ is no more.

The judge ruled, in response to charges filed against blogger Robert Alai for posts he had made about the President, that the section was vague and an unjustifiable limitation to freedom of expression: and further that it was too retrogressive for an open and democratic society such as Kenya.

It was a brave ruling: the very same judge has already waded into controversy on previous rulings, appearing determinedly more dedicated to the mission of implementing the law, and the Constitution, than to any cultivation of political favour.

But in a week of vigorous debate, and perhaps far less violence than could have been the case, his one ruling brought home the changes that we have achieved as a nation, even at this most sensitive of times.

In Alai’s case, the matter at hand was the handling of the NYS scandal in Kibera. The verdict Alai won is that we have the right to criticise public officers.

The authority of those public officers is still assured, in fact. They have authority. But the right to judge their performance is a constitutional right. And rightly so.

For it doesn’t matter which party we support, or which leader, we have a mountain to climb in achieving enough food for the three million Kenyans who will sleep hungry tonight, and jobs for the 60 per cent of youth currently unemployed. Nor do our ‘excluded’ come from any one tribe, or any one political party: and they all need a chance in life.

So we need the best job done every time. Yet allowing freedom of speech requires maturity and forbearance from all of us.

It is the nature of many of the world’s most outspoken bloggers that they can be vitriolic. But are they right? Is what they say true? This, in the end, is the boundary of freedom of speech.

And that’s a painful spread for all those who stand to lead. As a sometime PR practitioner, I have sat too often with figures bruised on public criticism.

And not only politicians: CEOs, authors, and pop stars. It can be a body blow copping criticism read by hundreds of thousands of people with no friendly effort at being ‘constructive’. Public life, indeed, can be soul destroying for some.

But we all do have the right to judge our leaders for their actions, for their achievements, and for their failures. Or how can we vote?

To stand in any quadrant of public life is to be judged. We won’t all agree with every view cast by every critic: the attacks may even offend us, and can deliver a backlash as much as any support.

But the process of arriving at a judgment, all views heard, is an essential foundation of decision making, and we have to allow it, to get the best decisions, for the most.

As it is, in Kenya, we have the right to vote, to judge, to put our viewpoint and to criticise. And all of that under our chosen leaders.

So hats off to Alai for fighting for the best job every time. And hats off to all of our establishment for being big enough to believe that’s best for Kenya.