THE YES TEAM MUST BE WARY OF THE JOHNNY-COME-LATELIES.

Despite the research findings by Synovate Research that seem to suggest that the No Team is currently drenched in torrential political rain accompanied with political crashing, the Yes Team cannot afford to sit on its laurels. If anything, this research finding should signal the beginning of a series of protracted campaigns to discount the heavy dose of misinformation purveyed by the No Team to ensure that draft constitution wins overwhelming support especially from the doubtful pockets of the expansive Rift Valley Province. With focus and clear strategy, it will be unsurprising for the draft constitution to receive unprecedented backing from the electorates in say Eldoret North constituency.

The Yes Team must strive to bring everybody on board, but in so doing, the Yes Team must be wary of the Johnny-come-latelies and the active portfolio strategists who are forced by circumstances to invest where political conditions seem favorable to them. This is because such elements are more often than not to bring in to the Yes Team shades of opinion that are unhealthy. For starters, some have already began suggesting that in order to bring everybody on board, there is need for the Yes Team to purge the draft constitution of its contentious clauses to make it more suitable for a pluralistic democracy. They opine that an addendum is the only way out of the seeming intractable constitutional difficulty. Prima facie, an addendum appears like some god send opportunity to solve this intractable constitutional difficulty.

However, a closer look at it reveals that engaging in such an exercise is akin to an additive inverse. This is because one man`s meat is another man`s poison. In other words, there are those of us with quite a number of contentious issues in the constitution. The fact that we have kept our cool should not be misconstrued to mean that we are completely satisfied with the provisions in the draft constitution. This then means that were we to isolate the contentious issues then almost every article and clause in the draft constitution will be forced to become an addendum. In my opinion, we have reached the ne plus ultra. From the foregoing, any move to re-open the draft will therefore serve the interest of those unwilling to promulgate a new constitution.

Suffice to say that we must at this stage elect to deal with actualities. We must therefore not be willing victims to either those suffering from accelerated political depreciation or those suffering from political acceleration stress.
Already, Moi; the self professed political professor (emeritus) opines that the country is better served with the current constitution and that we only need minimum constitutional amendments to make it even better. How on earth can one seek consensus with such a person? Like Moi, key political players from the expansive Rift Valley Province are cunningly hiding under the churches’ cloak to achieve their selfish political desires. They have elected to use freedom of speech not so much to express their wants but to conceal them.

As for the grand coalition government, it must not shy away from saying that the draft constitution is a government project. It is. It became a project of the coalition government (read as the people of Kenya) the day it (the coalition Government) pledged to the citizenry that it will deliver a new constitution.

TOME FRANCIS,
BUMULA.
http://twitter.com/tomefrancis