(Kennedy Mong'are Okong'o was the first Nyamira Senator. He is also the National Liberal Party leader)
As the clock ticks towards the closure of judgments at the Supreme Court to aggrieved elections petition losers from lower courts, more questions than answers abound.
The Supreme Court which is the highest level of recourse for any aggrieved party in matters elections has raised eyebrows after its ruling to some gubernatorial petitions before it.
As a legal practitioner, I am astounded on the following judgment and rulings on the Embu, Machakos and Homa Bay gubernatorial petitions.
There are legal and jurisprudential questions galore in the above cases. Many legal scholars and political historians will agree with me that perhaps Kenya is not ripe for a Supreme Court.
It defeats legal logic for the Supreme Court to nullify a presidential election and fail to nullify cases of governors whose evidence was more glaring than that of the presidential petition.
The ruling on the presidential election petition gave room for nullification of subsequent petitions on the legal basis of precedence.
How can seven members who do not try matters, listen to adduced pieces of evidence and later make rulings and judgment which will be questioned by legal pedestrian first-year law students and village madmen who know the actual winners in an election?
We have to relook and interrogate the role of the apex court. I now agree with President Uhuru Kenyatta’s sentiments a while back that it's time to 'revisit’ the role of this court be it through a referendum or another legal way.
The fight between the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court has once again glared its head.
Reliable sources in the corridors of the law intimate how each court ridicules the other.
The Appellate Court judges are rumoured and alleged to brag how some Supreme Court judges are ignorant of the law as it is comprised of university dons.
Additionally, the alleged right of reply from the Supreme Court to the Court of Appeal is that the Appellate Court judges need to be taught the law by Supreme Court scholars.
I can clearly see this cold war and the casualties are the citizens who vote and the taxes are wasted in the name of dispensation of justice.
In some Commonwealth jurisdictions and European countries, most, if not all members of the bar, are men and women with known jurisprudential knowledge.
Their scholarly outputs and their decisions are hard to ignore as they form part of scholarly powerhouses who create laws.
That’s what we need in Kenya because we have a tragedy in our judicial system which can only be described as a travesty for the common folks.
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