KENYA'S Constitution review will be ready by June – to the surprise and dismay of politicians across the spectrum, who are desperately scheming to delay the process using members of the Prof Yash Pal Ghai-led Constitution of Kenya Review Commision (CKRC).

On Friday last week, Prof Ghai and his team entered the final lap of the public side of their work – visiting all Kenya’s constituencies to gather the views of citizens about the constitution they want.

The Commission’s own documentation indicates that this process will be completed in a few weeks and will add to an already huge amount of information in the form of taped submissions, written memoranda and a host of other compilations of views collected by the CKRC thus far.

However, the success of the entire process hinges on what happens over the next few weeks. As things stand, the CKRC is well on its way to finishing the public phase of its work by April, allowing it to get its recommendations ready by June. 

Political brokers opposed to the process, and even some members of the CKRC who want it extended indefinitely, argue that it cannot be completed on time. The commissioners are said to have become accustomed to over Ksh500,000 ($6,400) per month in salary and perks (half of it tax free). This does not include per diems of Ksh8,500 ($109 ) per day when they travel out of town. The operating costs for the CKRC are said to be almost Ksh50 million ($640,000) per month Ð or over half a billion shillings a year.

There is a growing confluence among political actors who don’t want the constitutional review completed. Kanu hardliners want to delay the process so that they can justify an extension of the life of parliament and the current presidency, while others would like parliament to be dissolved as soon as possible after the reading of the budget in June and the implementation of a shotgun series of so-called "minimum reforms" that would see the country launched headlong into a general election.

National Development Party leader Raila Odinga is said to belong to this latter camp, though MPs who attended a February 21 meeting of the parliamentary select committee on the constitution that Ghai addressed say that Raila and other legislators were impressed by the professor’s confidence that the process would be completed in time.

Meanwhile, some DP legislators have been arguing that it is important to tidy up the whole electoral process before all else – for example, the number of constituencies, issues of registration of voters, the Electoral Commission of Kenya (the terms of whose commissioners expires in October) and so on.

Others like the NDP and Young Turk group in Kanu want a totally new structure to government – with several vice presidents, prime ministers of different categories and the like. There is said to be growing unanimity between the DP and NDP positions and that of elements in Kanu who want a more dispersed power structure.

Key figures in some opposition parties are said to have realised that they can only build alliances if they can horse-trade positions in the post-election dispensation. For this to happen, a multiplicity of positions needs to be created to keep promises made over the next few months as alliances are forged.

But sources say the politicians would rather the CKRC itself indicated it could not finish the job on time, rather than being seen to be pushing for this deeply unpopular position themselves.

Sources say that, as the elections draw near, politicians in both Kanu and the opposition are beginning to fear that the CKRC process will yield politically unpredictable results. Though they won’t say it, many of them don’t trust the Kenyan people to deliver the kind of arrangement that would benefit them.

The argument quietly being pushed on both sides of the House is that: "The process cannot be completed on time so we need minimum reforms to be implemented that will facilitate the holding of free and fair elections." But the MPs would also prefer that the minimum reforms are agreed upon via inter-parties consultations rather than the nationally participatory approach that the CKRC is mandated to carry out. They prefer quiet deal-making in closed rooms to a transparent process.

Sources close to the Commission, however, say that the official opposition’s position on the constitutional reform process was "clarified" towards the end of last week at a meeting Prof Ghai had on Thursday morning at 11am with Mwai Kibaki, Kiraitu Murungi and George Nyamweya.

DP officials later said Ghai’s presentation finally convinced the DP bigwigs that comprehensive constitutional reform can indeed be accomplished by around June, "so long as the CKRC enjoys the requisite political support." Prof Ghai is said to be slated to make a similar presentation to the opposition National Alliance this Thursday.

The Commission itself is by no means united on the need to finish on time. Analysts say the CKRC is a mirror of both the positive and negative trends in Kenyan politics. Of late, there has been spirited lobbying by some commissioners who say they cannot possibly finish their job on time. 

Hefty salaries and allowances are not the only motive. Sources say some commissioners, including at the CKRC’s highest levels, continue to take instructions from key political figures. What is more, contradictory instructions appear to be issued on different issues to different commissioners by different politicians with the only consistent line being to stall a process whose political implications no one can predict.

The susceptibility to political manipulation of some of the commissioners and staff of the CKRC, and their capacity for venality, has astounded even cynical observers who have come into contact with the Commission. It is said Prof Ghai, and the commissioners who remain focused on the goal of a new constitution for Kenyans, have had to play a delicate game of trade-offs, allowing some colleagues to get away with bizarre displays of greed and lack of principle just to get the job done.

Within the first couple of months of the commissioners getting controversially expensive vehicles, several of these cars had been in crashes. One of the accidents almost killed one of the commissioners, but she was lucky to survive. The repair bill for these crashed vehicles is said to run into the millions – in one case alone, it amounted to over Ksh400,000 ($5,000). It was later discovered that many vehicles had been fitted with the wrong tyres, forcing the CKRC to spend around Ksh2 million ($25,000) refitting most of their vehicles. 

Also, because of the way their terms are drafted, the commissioners were entitled to Ksh80,000 ($1,000) per month as transport allowance if they did not take a vehicle from the Commission. Upon realising this, some of those who had fought hardest for the large four-wheel drives, lined up to abandon their vehicles to take the Ksh80,000 per month home instead.

Even though they wrote to the Commission asking for the cars to be taken back so they could get the cash instead, many have gone ahead and have kept both the cars and the Ksh80,000 per month. This is against Treasury regulations. 

By last week, some commissioners were quietly lobbying for the introduction of a "reading allowance," on the grounds that they had to read through a great many documents.

Sources said the "sharks" circling both inside and outside the commission would "bare their fangs" over the coming weeks. Commissioners keen to see the process completed on time for their own credibility, and the credibility of the process itself, point to the achievements of the CKRC since its inception: The Secretariat is up and literally running – 80 district co-ordinators have been appointed to manage the District Documentation Centres, assist the Constituency Constitutional Committees and other critical formations that are now online. And the civic education process is quietly underway right across the republic – implemented by countless groups using a curriculum they developed with the CKRC in September last year, with co-ordination by large groupings of NGOs jointly funded by the Like Minded Donors (LIMID) group of donor representatives. The process of public hearings started on December 12 in Nairobi and provincial capitals and has been zooming along.

In the rural areas, the collecting of views from wananchi has become particularly intense. The CKRC has already hired data analysts who have started compiling the deluge of views collected into a form that can be usefully and easily compiled into the commission’s final report.

Wherever the Commission’s people go, regardless of what kind of event it is – workshop, planning meetings, collection of views – Kenyans insist on making submissions to the CKRC. All these are recorded and have both deepened and expanded the commission’s reach, say sources. 

The gathering momentum in the rural areas has alarmed political figures opposed to the process. Some of the politicians who were dead-set against civic education at the beginning of the review process – especially the involvement of churches and NGOs – have now started to argue that Kenyans need "more" civic education.

Meanwhile, some commissioners are insisting that the CKRC panels that started visiting each constituency last week be composed of as many commissioners as possible. With delegation-size groups of commissioners visiting every constituency in their Sports Utility Vehicles to hold hearings lasting several days (at Ksh8,500 a day each), the process can never be completed in time, inside sources say.

They point out that panels of two commissioners have sufficed in the past, especially as all these sessions are recorded (both audio and video).

At the end of this week, the commissioners will meet to review progress. The EastAfrican has learnt that politically manipulated commissioners will then argue for the delegation approach to the public hearings around Kenya.

If this school of thought succeeds, observers say, the forces opposed to the process will have won.

Under the Constitution of Kenya Review Act, the deadline for the CKRC to finish its work and for the new constitution to be adopted is September this year (24 months since October 2000). Under the Act, the CKRC can ask parliament for an extension and even recommend minimum reforms.